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REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

REPRESENTATIVE MEN

SEVEN LECTURES,

BY R. W. EMERSON.

BOSTON:

PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY,

110 Washington Street.
1850.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849,

BY PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.

STEHEOTTPED BT

CHARLES VT. COLTON,
No. 2 Water Street.

CONTENTS

I. — Uses op Great Men, 9

IE. — Plato ; or, the Philosopher, ....... 43

Plato: New Readings, 82

hi. — swedenborg ; or, the mystic, 95

IV. — Montaigne ; or, the Skeptic, 149

V. — Shakspeare ; or, the Poet, 187

VI. — Napoleon ; or, the Man op the World, . . .219
VIL — Goethe ; or, the Writer, 257

USES OF GREAT MEN.

USES OE GREAT MEN

It is natural to believe in great men. If the
companions of our childhood should turn out to
be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not
surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods,
and the circumstance is high and poetic ; that is,
their genius is paramount. In the legends of the
Gautama, the first men ate the earth, and found
it deliciously sweet.

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The
world is upheld by the veracity of good men :
they make the earth wholesome. Thefy who
lived with them found life glad and nutritious.
Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such
society; and actually, or ideally, we manage to
live with superiors. We call our children and
our lands by their names. Their names are
wrought into the verbs of language, their works
and effigies are in our houses, and every cir-

10 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

cumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of
them.

The search after the great is the dream of
youth, and the most serious occupation of man-
hood. We travel into foreign parts to find his
works, — if possible, to get a glimpse of him.
But we are put off with fortune instead. You
say, the English are practical ; the Germans are
hospitable j in Valencia, the climate is delicious ;
and in the hills of the Sacramento, there is gold
for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel to find
comfortable, rich, and hospitable people, or clear
sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were
any magnet that would point to the countries
and houses where are the persons who are in-
trinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all, and
buy it, and put myself on the road to-day.

The race goes with us on their credit. The
knowledge, that in the city is a man who invented
the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens.
But enormous populations, if they be beggars,
are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of
ants, or of fleas — the more, the worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these
patrons. The gods of fable are the shining
moments of great men. We run all our ves-
sels into one mould. Our colossal theologies
of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism,

USES OF GREAT MEN. 11

are the necessary and structural action of the
human mind. The student of history is like a
man going into a warehouse to buy cloths or
carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go
to the factory, he shall find that his new stuff
still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found
on the interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes.
Our theism is the purification of the human mind.
Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but
man. He believes that the great material elements
had their origin from his thought. And our
philosophy finds one essence collected or distrib-
uted.

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds
of service we derive from others, let us be warned
of the danger of modern studies, and begin low
enough. We must not contend against love, or
deny the substantial existence of other people. I
know not what would happen to us. We have
social strengths. Our affection towards others
creates a sort of vantage or purchase which noth-
ing will supply. I can do that by another which
I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I can-
not first say to myself. Other men are lenses
through which we read our own minds. Each
man seeks those of different quality from his
own, and such as are good of their kind ; that is,

12 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

he seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger
the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have
the quality pure. A little genius let us leave
alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether
they attend their own affair or not. Man is that
noble endogenous plant which grows, like the
palm, from within, outward. His own affair,
though impossible to others, he can open with
celerity and in sport. It is easy to sugar to be
sweet, and to nitre to be salt. We take a great
deal of pains to waylay and entrap that which of
itself will fall into our hands. I count him a
great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought,
into which other men rise with labor and difficul-
ty ; he has but to open his eyes to see things in
a true light, and in large relations j whilst they
must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant
eye on many sources of error. His service to us
is of like sort. It costs a beautiful person no
exertion to paint her image on our eyes ; yet
how splendid is that benefit ! It costs no more
for a wise soul to convey his quality to other
men. And every one can do his best thing
easiest. " Peu de moyens, beaucoup cPeffet"
He is great who is what he is from nature, and
who never reminds us of others.

But he must be related to us, and our life receive
from him some promise of explanation. I cannot

USES OF GREAT MEN. 13

tell what I would know j but I have observed there
are persons who, in their character and actions,
answer questions which I have not skill to put.
One man answers some question which none of his
contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and
passing religions and philosophies answer some
other question. Certain men affect us as rich
possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to
their times, — the sport, perhaps, of some instinct
that rules in the air j — they do not speak to
our want. But the great are near; we know
them at sight. They satisfy expectation, and
fall into place, What is good is effective, gen-
erative j makes for itself room, food, and allies.
A sound apple produces seed, — a hybrid does
not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive,
fertile, magnetic, inundating armies with his pur-
pose, which is thus executed. The river makes
its own shores, and each legitimate idea makes its
own channels and welcome, — harvests for food,
institutions for expression, weapons to fight with,
and disciples to explain it. The true artist has
the planet for his pedestal ; the adventurer, after
years of strife, has nothing broader than his own
shoes.

Our common discourse respects two kinds of
use or service from superior men. Direct giving
is agreeable to the early belief of men j direct
2

14

REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of
health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing,
magical power, and prophecy. The boy believes
there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom.
Churches believe in imputed merit. But, in strict-
ness, we are not much cognizant of direct serving.
Man is endogenous, and education is his unfold-
ing. The aid we have from others is mechanical,
compared with the discoveries of nature in us.
What is thus learned is delightful in the doing,
and the effect remains. Right ethics are central,
and go from the soul outward. Gift is contrary
to the law of the universe. Serving others is
serving us. I must absolve me to myself. ' Mind
thy affair,' says the spirit : — l coxcomb, would
you meddle with the skies, or with other people ? '
Indirect service is left. Men have a pictorial or
representative quality, and serve us in the intel-
lect. Behmen and Swedenborg saw that things
were representative. Men are also representative ;
first, of things, and secondly, of ideas.

As plants convert the minerals into food for
animals, so each man converts some raw material
in nature to human use. The inventors of fire,
electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk,
cotton ; the makers of tools ; the inventor of deci-
mal notation ; the geometer ; the engineer ; the
severally make an easy way for

USES OF GREAT MEN. 15

all, through unknown and impossible confusions.
Each man is, by secret liking, connected with some
district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he
is, as Linnaeus, of plants ; Huber, of bees ; Fries,
of lichens ; Van Mons, of pears ; Dalton, of atomic
forms ; Euclid, of lines ; Newton, of fluxions.

A man is a centre for nature, running out
threads of relation through every thing, fluid and
solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls ;
every clod and stone comes to the meridian : so
every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust,
has its relation to the brain. It waits long, but
its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and
each created thing its lover and poet. Justice has
already been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to
coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn, and cotton ;
but how few materials are yet used by our arts !
The mass of creatures and of qualities are still
hid and expectant. It would seem as if each
waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales,
for a destined human deliverer. Each must be
disenchanted, and walk forth to the day in
human shape. In the history of discovery, the
ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a
brain for itself. A magnet must be made man,
in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, be-
fore the general mind can come to entertain its
powers.

16 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages; —
a sober grace adheres to the mineral and botanic
kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes
up as the charm of nature, — the glitter of the
spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of
angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold, hun-
ger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and
gas, circle us round in a wreath of pleasures, and,
by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life.
The eye repeats every day the first eulogy on
things — "He saw that they were good." We
know where to find them j and these performers
are relished all the more, after a little experience
of the pretending races. We are entitled, also,
to higher advantages. Something is wanting to
science, until it has been humanized. The table
of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play, in
botany, music, optics, and architecture, another.
There are advancements to numbers, anatomy,
architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first,
when, by union with intellect and will, they as-
cend into the life, and reappear in conversation,
character, and politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of
our acquaintance with them in their own sphere,
and the way in which they seem to fascinate and
draw to them some genius who occupies himself
with one thing, all his life long. The possibility

USES OF GREAT MEN. 17

of interpretation lies in the identity of the
observer with the observed. Each material thing
has its celestial side ; has its translation, through
humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere,
where it plays a part as indestructible as any
other. And to these, their ends, all things con-
tinually ascend. The gases gather to the solid
firmament : the chemic lump arrives at the plant,
and grows ; arrives at the quadruped, and walks ;
arrives at the man, and thinks. But also the
constituency determines the vote of the repre-
sentative. He is not only representative, but
participant. Like can only be known by like.
The reason why he knows about them is, that
he is of them ; he has just come out of
nature, or from being a part of that thing. An-
imated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate
zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes his career ;
and he can variously publish their virtues, because
they compose him. Man, made of the dust of
the world, does not forget his origin j and all that
is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason.
Unpublished nature will have its whole secret
told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will
pulverize into innumerable Werners, Yon Buchs,
and Beaumonts ; and the laboratory of the atmos-
phere holds in solution I know not what Ber-
zeliuses and Davys ?

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18 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on the
poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence
supplies the imbecility of our condition. In one
of those celestial days, when heaven and earth
meet and adorn each other, it seems a poverty
that we can only spend it once : we wish for a
thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might
celebrate its immense beauty in many ways and
places. Is this fancy ? Well, in good faith, we
are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we
adopt their labors ! Every ship that comes to
America got its chart from Columbus. Every
novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter
who shaves with a foreplane borrows the genius
of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all round with
a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who
have perished to add their point of light to our
sky. Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moral-
ist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has
any science, is a de finer and map-maker of the
latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These
road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must
extend the area of life, and multiply our relations.
We are as much gainers by finding a new property
in the old earth, as by acquiring a new planet.

We are too passive in the reception of these
material or semi-material aids. We must not be
sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step, — we are

USES OF GREAT MEN. 19

better served through our sympathy. Activity is
contagious. Looking where others look, and
conversing with the same things, we catch the
charm which lured them. Napoleon said, " You
must not fight too often with one enemy, or you
will teach him all your art of war." Talk much
with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire
very fast the habit of looking at things in the
same light, and, on each occurrence, we anticipate
his thought.

Men are helpful through the intellect and the
affections. Other help, I find a false appearance.
If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive
that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves
me as it found me, neither better nor worse : but
all mental and moral force is a positive good. It
goes out from you, whether you will or not, and
profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot
even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great
power of performance, without fresh resolution.
We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's
saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, " I know that he
can toil terribly," is an electric touch. So are
Clarendon's portraits, — of Hampden ; " who was
of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out
or wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not
to be imposed on by the most subtle and sharp,
and of a personal courage equal to his best parts,"— -

20 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

of Falkland ; " who was so severe an adorer of
truth, that he could as easily have given himself
leave to steal, as to dissemble." "We cannot read
Plutarch, without a tingling of the blood ; and I
accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius : " A
sage is the instructer of a hundred ages. When
the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become
intelligent, and the wavering, determined."

This is the moral of biography ; yet it is hard
for departed men to touch the quick like our own
companions, whose names may not last as long.
What is he whom I never think of? whilst in
every solitude are those who succor our genius,
and stimulate us in wonderful manners. There
is a power in love to divine another's destiny bet-
ter than that other can, and, by heroic encour-
agements, hold him to his task. What has friend-
ship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever
virtue is in us? We will never more think
cheaply of ourselves, or of life. We are piqued
to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers
on the railroad will not again shame us.

Under this head, too, falls that homage, very
pure, as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero
of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus, down
to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamar-
tine. Hear the shouts in the street ! The people
cannot see him enough. They delight in a man.

USES OF GREAT MEN. 21

Here is a head and a trunk ! What a front !
what eyes ! Atlantean shoulders, and the whole
carriage heroic, with equal inward force to guide
the great machine ! This pleasure of full expres-
sion to that which, in their private experience, is
usually cramped and obstructed, runs, also, much
higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in lit-
erary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is
fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shak-
speare's principal merit may be conveyed, in say-
ing that he, of all men, best understands the
English language, and can say what he will.
Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of
expression are only health or fortunate constitu-
tion. Shakspeare's name suggests other and
purely intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment,
with their medals, swords, and armorial coats, like
the addressing to a human being thoughts out of
a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence.
This honor, which is possible in personal inter-
course scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpet-
ually pays ; contented, if now and then, in a cen-
tury, the proffer is accepted. The indicators of
the values of matter are degraded to a sort of
cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the
indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or
geographer of the supersensible regions, and

22 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

draws their map ; and, by acquainting us with
new fields of activity, cools our affection for the
old. These are at once accepted as the reality,
of which the world we have conversed with is
the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-
school to see the power and beauty of the body ;
there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit,
from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds ; as,
feats of memory, of mathematical combination,
great power of abstraction, the transmutings of
the imagination, even versatility, and concentra-
tion, as these acts expose the invisible organs and
members of the mind, which respond, member
for member, to the parts of the body. For, we
thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose
men by their truest marks, taught, with Plato,
"to choose those who can, without aid from the
eyes, or any other sense, proceed to truth and to
being." Foremost among these activities, are the
summersaults, spells, and resurrections, wrought
by the imagination. When this wakes, a man
seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times
his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeter-
minate size, and inspires an audacious mental
habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpow-
der, and a sentence in a book,, or a word dropped
in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly

USES OF GREAT MEN. 23

our heads are bathed Avith galaxies, and our feet
tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is
real, because we are entitled to these enlargements,
and, once having passed the bounds, shall never
again be quite the miserable pedants we were.

The high functions of the intellect are so allied,
that some imaginative power usually appears in
all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the
first class, but especially in meditative men of an
intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us,
so that they have the perception of identity and
the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato,
Shakspeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on
either of these laws. The perception of these
laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds
are little, through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our de-
light in reason degenerates into idolatry of the
herald. Especially when a mind of powerful
method has instructed men, we find the examples
of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the
Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of
Bacon, of Locke, — in religion, the history of
hierarchies, of saints, and the sects which have
taken the name of each founder, are in point.
Alas ! every man is such a victim. The imbecil-
ity of men is always inviting the impudence of
power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to daz-

24 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

zle and to bind the beholder. But true genius
seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will
not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new
senses. If a wise man should appear in our vil-
lage, he would create, in those who conversed
with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by
opening their eyes to unobserved advantages ; he
would establish a sense of immovable equality,
calm us with assurances that we could not be
cheated ; as every one would discern the checks
and guaranties of condition. The rich would
see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their
escapes and their resources.

But nature brings all this about in due time.
Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient
of masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers
say of a domestic who has been valuable, " She
had lived with me long enough." We are ten-
dencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us com-
plete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of
many lives. Rotation is the law of nature.
When nature removes a great man, people explore
the horizon for a successor ; but none comes, and
none will. His class is extinguished with him.
In some other and quite different field, the next
man will appear ; not Jefferson, not Franklin, but
now a great salesman j then a road-contractor ;
then a student of fishes ; then a buffalo-hunting

USES OF GREAT MEN. 25

explorer, or a semi-savage western general. Thus
we make a stand against our rougher masters ; but
against the best there is a finer remedy. The
power which they communicate is not theirs.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe
this to Plato, but to the idea, to which, also, Plato
was debtor.

I must not forget that we have a special debt
to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees.
Between rank and rank of our great men are
wide intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached
themselves to a few persons, who, either by the
quality of that idea they embodied, or by the large-
ness of their reception, were entitled to the posi-
tion of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the
qualities of primary nature, — admit us to the con-
stitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a
river of delusions, and are effectually amused with
houses and towns in the air, of which the men
about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity. In
lucid intervals we say, ' Let there be an entrance
opened for me into realities ; I have worn the fool's
cap too long.' We will know the meaning of our
economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and,
if persons and things are scores of a celestial music,
let us read off the strains. We have been cheated
of our reason ; yet there have been sane men, who
enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they
3

26 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

know, they know for us. With each new mind,
a new secret of nature transpires ; nor can the
Bible be closed, until the last great man is born.
These men correct the delirium of the animal
spirits, make us considerate, and engage us to
new aims and. powers. The veneration of man-
kind selects these for the highest place. Witness
the multitude of statues, pictures, and memorials
which recall their genius in every city, village,
house, and ship : —

" Ever their phantoms arise Defore us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood ;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us,
With looks of beauty, and words of good."

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas,
the service rendered by those who introduce moral
truths into the general mind ? — I am plagued,
in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices.
If I work in my garden, and prime an apple-tree,
I am well enough entertained, and could continue
indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes
to mind that a day is gone, and I have got
this precious nothing done. I go to Boston or
New York, and run up and down on my affairs :
they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed
by the recollection of this price I have paid for a
trifling advantage. I remember the peau d'ane,

USES OF GREAT MEN. 27

on which whoso sat should have his desire, but
a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I
go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I
can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But
if there should appear in the company some gentle
soul who knows little of persons or parties, of
Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that
disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of
the equity which checkmates every false player,
bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of
my independence on any conditions of country,
or time, or human body, that man liberates me ; I
forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation
to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am
made immortal by apprehending my possession
of incorruptible goods. Here is great competi-
tion of rich and poor. We live in a market,
where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land ;
and if I have so much more, every other must
have so much less. I seem to have no good,
without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad
in the gladness of another, and our system is one
of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child
of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first.
It is our system ; and a man comes to measure his
greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his
competitors. But in these new fields there is
room : here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.

28 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

I admire great men of all classes, those who
stand for facts, and for thoughts ; I like rough
and smooth, " Scourges of God," and " Darlings
of the human race." I like the first Csesar ; and
Charles Y., of Spain ; and Charles XII., of Swe-
den ; Richard Plantagenet ; and Bonaparte, in
France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer
equal to his office ; captains, ministers, senators.
I like a master standing firm on legs of iron, well-
born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with
advantages, drawing all men by fascination into
tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword
and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry-
on the work of the world. But I find him greater,
when he can abolish himself, and all heroes, by
letting in this element of reason, irrespective of
persons ; this subtiliser, and irresistible upward
force, into our thought, destroying individualism ;
the power so great, that the potentate is nothing.
Then he is a monarch, who gives a constitution
to his people ; a pontiff, who preaches the equality
of souls, and releases his servants from their bar-
barous homages ; an emperor, who can spare his
empire.

But I intended to specify, with a little minute-
ness, two or three points of service. Nature
never spares the opium or nepenthe ; but, wher-

USES OF GREAT MEN. 29

ever she mars her creature with some deformity
or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the
bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life,
ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it,
though all the world point their finger at it
every day. The worthless and offensive mem-
bers of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used
people alive, and never get over their astonish-
ment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden
virtues, not only in heroes and archangels, but in
gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance
that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the
conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being
waked or changed? Altogether independent of
the intellectual force in each, is the pride of
opinion, the security that we are right. Not the
feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses
what spark of perception and faculty is left, to
chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over
the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from
me is the measure of absurdity. Not one has a
misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright
thought that made things cohere with this bitu-
men, fastest of cements ? But, in the midst of
this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes
by, which Thersites too can love and admire.
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30 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

This is he that should marshal us the way we
were going. There is no end to his aid. With-
out Plato, we should almost lose our faith in the
possibility of a reasonable book. We seem
to want but one, but we want one. We love to
associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity
is unlimited j and, with the great, our thoughts
and manners easily become great. We are all
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There
needs but one wise man in a company, and all are
wise, so rapid is the contagion.

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our
eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other
people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages.
Men resemble their contemporaries, even more
than their progenitors. It is observed in old
couples, or in persons who have been housemates
for a course of years, that they grow alike ; and,
if they should live long enough, we should not
be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these
complaisances, which threaten to melt the world
into a lump, and hastens to break up such maud-
lin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on
between men of one town, of one sect, of one
political party ; and the ideas of the time are in
the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed
from any high point, this city of New York,

USES OF GREAT MEN. 31

yonder city of London, the western civilization,
would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance, and exasperate by
emulation the frenzy of the time. The shield
against the stingings of conscience, is the univer-
sal practice, or our contemporaries. Again ; it is
very easy to be as wise and good as your com-
panions. We learn of our contemporaries what
they know, without efTort, and almost through
the pores of the skin. We catch it by sympathy,
or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual and moral
elevations of her husband. But we stop where
they stop. Yery hardly can we take another
step. The great, or such as hold of nature, and
transcend fashions, by their fidelity to universal
ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, and
defend us from our contemporaries. They are
the exceptions which we want, where all grows
alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for
cabalism.

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves
from too much conversation with our mates, and
exult in the depth of nature in that direction in
which he leads us. What indemnification is one
great man for populations of pigmies ! Every
mother wishes one son a genius, though all the
rest should be mediocre. But a new danger ap-
pears in the excess of influence of the great man.

32 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

His attractions warp us from our place. We have
become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah !
yonder in the horizon is our help : — other great
men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on
each other. We cloy of the honey of each pe-
culiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at
last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet
he said of the good Jesus, even, " I pray you, let
me never hear that man's name again." They
cry up the virtues of George Washington, —
" Damn George Washington ! " is the poor Jaco-
bin's whole speech and confutation. But it is
human nature's indispensable defence. The cen-
tripetence augments the centrifugence. We bal-
ance one man with his opposite, and the health
of the state depends on the see-saw.

There is, however, a speedy limit to the use
of heroes. Every genius is defended from ap-
proach by quantities of unavailableness. They
are very attractive, and seem at a distance our
own : but we are hindered on all sides from
approach. The more we are drawn, the more
we are repelled. There is something not solid
in the good that is done for us. The best
discovery the discoverer makes for himself.
It has something unreal for his companion,
until he too has substantiated it. It seems as
if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends

USES OF GREAT MEN. 33

into nature in certain virtues and powers not
communicable to other men, and, sending it to
perform one more turn through the circle of
beings, wrote " Not transferable" and " Good
for this trip only" on these garments of the
soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the
intercourse of minds. The boundaries are
invisible, but they are never crossed. There
is such good will to impart, and such good
will to receive, that each threatens to become
the other ; but the law of individuality col-
lects its secret strength : you are you, and I
am I, and so we remain.

For nature wishes every thing to remain
itself; and, whilst every individual strives to
grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow,
to the extremities of the universe, and to
impose the law of its being on every other
creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each
against every other. Each is self-defended.
Nothing is more marked than the power by
which individuals are guarded from individuals,
in a world where every benefactor becomes so
easily a malefactor, only by continuation of his
activity into places where it is not due ; where
children seem so much at the mercy of their
foolish parents, and where almost all men are
too social and interfering. We rightly speak

34 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

of the guardian angels of children, How
superior in their security from infusions of
evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought !
They shed their own abundant beauty on the
objects they behold. Therefore, they are not
at the mercy of such poor educators as we
adults. If we huff and chide them, they soon
come not to mind it, and get a self-reliance ;
and if we indulge them to folly, they learn
the limitation elsewhere.

We need not fear excessive influence. A
more generous trust is permitted. Serve the
great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no
office thou canst render. Be the limb of their
body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise
thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou
gain aught wider and nobler ? Never mind
the taunt of Boswellism : the devotion may
easily be greater than the wretched pride
which is guarding its own skirts. Be another :
not thyself, but a Platonist ; not a soul, but a
Christian ; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian ;
not a poet, but a Shaksperian. In vain, the
wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all
the forces of inertia, fear, or of love itself,
hold thee there. On, and forever onward !
The microscope observes a monad or wheel-
insect among the infusories circulating in water.

USES OF GREAT MEN. 35

Presently, a dot appears on the animal, which
enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect
animals. The ever-proceeding detachment ap-
pears not less in all thought, and in society.
Children think they cannot live without their
parents. But, long before they are aware of
it, the black dot has appeared, and the detach-
ment taken place. Any accident will now
reveal to them their independence.

But great men : — the word is injurious. Is
there caste ? is there fate ? What becomes of
the promise to virtue ? The thoughtful youth
laments the superfoetation of nature. ' Gener-
ous and handsome,' he says, 'is your hero; but
look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is
his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of
Paddies.' Why are the masses, from the dawn
of history down, food for knives and powder?
The idea dignifies a few leaders, who have
sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion ; and they
make war and death sacred ; — but what for
the wretches whom they hire and kill ? The
cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It
is as real a loss that others should be low,
as that we should be low ; for we must have
society.

Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say,

36 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

society is a Pestalozzian school : all are teach-
ers and pupils in turn. We are equally served
by receiving and by imparting. Men who
know the same things, are not long the best
company for each other. But bring to each
an intelligent person of another experience,
and it is as if you let off water from a lake,
by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechani-
cal advantage, and great benefit it is to each
speaker, as he can now paint out his thought
to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal
moods, from dignity to dependence. And if
any appear never to assume the chair, but
always to stand and serve, it is because we
do not see the company in a sufficiently long
period for the whole rotation of parts to come
about. As to what we call the masses, and
common men ; — there are no common men.
All men are at last of a size ; and true art is
only possible, on the conviction that every
talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play,
and an open field, and freshest laurels to all
who have won them ! But heaven reserves an
equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy
until he has produced his private ray unto
the concave sphere, and beheld his talent
also in its last nobility and exaltation.

The heroes of the hour are relatively great :

USES OF GREAT MEN. 37

of a faster growth ; or they are such, in whom,
at the moment of success, a quality is ripe
which is then in request. Other days will
demand other qualities. Some rays escape the
common observer, and want a finely adapted
eye. Ask the great man if there be none
greater. His companions are ; and not the
iess great, but the more, that society cannot
see them. Nature never sends a great man
mto the planet, without confiding the secret
to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies, —
that there is true ascension in our love. The
reputations of the nineteenth century will one
day be quoted, to prove its barbarism. The
genius of humanity is the real subject whose
biography is written in our annals. We must
infer much, and supply many chasms in the
record. The history of the universe is sympto-
matic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all
the procession of famous men, is reason or illumi-
nation, or that essence we were looking for ; but
is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new possibili-
ties. Could we one day complete the immense
figure which these flagrant points compose ! The
study of many individuals leads us to an elemen-
tal region wherein the individual is lost, or
wherein all touch by their summits. Thought
4

38 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

and feeling, that break out there, cannot be im-
pounded by any fence of personality. This is the
key to the power of the greatest men, — their spirit
diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by
night and by day, in concentric circles from its
origin, and publishes itself by unknown methods :
the union of all minds appears intimate : what
gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any
other : the smallest acquisition of truth or of
energy, in any quarter, is so much good to the
commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of
talent and position vanish, when the individuals
are seen in the duration which is necessary to
complete the career of each ; even more swiftly
the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend
to the central identity of all the individuals, and
know that they are made of the substance which
ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of
view of history. The qualities abide ; the men
who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away ; the qualities remain on another bro vv.
No experience is more familiar. Once you saw
phoenixes : they are gone ; the world is not there^
fore disenchanted. The vessels on which you
read sacred emblems turn out to be common pot-
tery ; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and
you may still read them transferred to the waBs

USES OF GREAT MEN. 39

of the world. For a time, our teachers serve us
personally, as metres or milestones of progress.
Once they were angels of knowledge, and their
figures touched the sky. Then we drew near,
saw their means, culture, and limits ; and they
yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy, if
a few names remain so high, that we have not
been able to read them nearer, and age and com-
parison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at
last, we shall cease to look in men for complete-
ness, and shall content ourselves with their social
and delegated quality. All that respects the
individual is temporary and prospective, like the
individual himself, who is ascending out of his
limits, into a catholic existence. We have never
come at the true and best benefit of any genius,
so long as we believe him an original force. In
the moment when he ceases to help us as a cause,
he begins to help us more as an effect. Then he
appears as an exponent of a vaster mind and will.
The opaque self becomes transparent with the light
of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education and
agency, we may say, great men exist that there
may be greater men. The destiny of organized
nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits ?
It is for man to tame the chaos ; on every side,

40 REPRESENTATIVE MEN*

whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and
of song, that climate, corn, animals, men r may be
milder, and the germs of love and benefit may be
multiplied.

PLATO;

OR,

THE PHILOSOPHER.

II.

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER

Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's
fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said,
"Burn the libraries; for, their value is in this
book." These sentences contain the culture of
nations ; these are the corner-stone of schools ;
these are the fountain-head of literatures. A
discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symme-
try, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals,
or practical wisdom. There was never such
range of speculation. Out of Plato come all
things that are still written and debated among
men of thought. Great havoc makes he among
our originalities. We have reached the mountain
from which all these drift boulders were detached.
The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred
years, every brisk young man, who says in succes-
sion fine things to each reluctant generation, — Boe-
thius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau,

44 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Alfieri, Coleridge, — is some reader of Plato, trans-
lating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things.
Even the men of grander proportion suffer some
deduction from the misfortune (shall I say ?) of
coming after this exhausting generalizer. St.
Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swe-
denborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors, and
must say after him. For it is fair to credit the
broadest generalizer with all the particulars dedu-
cible from his thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, —
at once the glory and the shame of mankind,
since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to
add any idea to his categories. No wife, no chil-
dren had he, and the thinkers of all civilized
nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his
mind. How many great men Nature is inces-
santly sending up out of night, to be his
men, — Platonists ! the Alexandrians, a constel-
lation of genius ; the Elizabethans, not less ;
Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales,
John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph
Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor ; Mar-
cilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism
is in his Phsedo : Christianity is in it. Mahom-
etanism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-
book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him.
Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This

PLATO J OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 45

citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor
patriot. An Englishman reads and says, 'how
English ! ' a German, — ' how Teutonic ! ' an
Italian, — l how Roman and how Greek ! 7 As
they say that Helen of Argos, had that universal
beauty that every body felt related to her, so
Plato seems, to a reader in New England, an
American genius. His broad humanity transcends
all sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think
of the vexed question concerning his reputed
works, — what are genuine, what spurious. It is
singular that wherever we find a man higher, by
a whole head, than any of his contemporaries, it
is sure to come into doubt, what are his real
works. Thus, Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shak-
speare. For these men magnetise their contem-
poraries, so that their companions can do for them
what they can never do for themselves ; and the
great man does thus live in several bodies, and
write, or paint, or act, by many hands : and, after
some time, it is not easy to say what is the au-
thentic work of the master, and what is only of
his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his
own times. What is a great man, but one of
great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts,
all knowables, as his food? He can

46 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

spare nothing ; he can dispose of every thing.
What is not good for virtue, is good for know-
ledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with
plagiarism. But the inventor only knows how to
borrow ; and society is glad to forget the innu-
merable laborers who ministered to this architect,
and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we
are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quota-
tions from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus.
Be it so. Every book is a quotation ; and every
house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines,
and stone quarries ; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor
puts all nations under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times, — Phi-
lolaus, Timeeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what
else ; then his master, Socrates ; and, finding him-
self still capable of a larger synthesis, — beyond
all example then or since, — he travelled into
Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had for him ; then
into Egypt, and perhaps still farther east, to im-
port the other element, which Europe wanted,
into the European mind. This breadth entitles
him to stand as the representative of philosophy-
He says, in the Republic, " Such a genius as
philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but
seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man ; but
its different parts generally spring up in different

PLATO ; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 4/

persons." Every man, who would do any thing
well, must come to it from a higher ground. A
philosopher must be more than a philosopher.
Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands
upon the highest place of the poet, and, (though
I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric ex-
pression,) mainly is not a poet, because he chose
to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.
They lived in their writings, and so their house
and street life was trivial and commonplace. If
you would know their tastes and complexions,,
the most admiring of their readers most resembles
them. Plato, especially, has no external biog-
raphy. If he had lover, wife, or children, we
hear nothing of them. He ground them all into
paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so
a philosopher converts the value of all his for-
tunes into his intellectual performances.

He was born 430, A. C, about the time of the
death of Pericles ; was of patrician connection in
his times and city ; and is said to have had an
early inclination for war ; but, in his twentieth
year, meeting with Socrates, was easily dissuaded
from this pursuit, and remained for ten years his
scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then
Avent to Megara ; accepted the invitations of Dion

48 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

and of Dionysius, to the court of Sicily ; and went
thither three times, though very capriciously
treated. He travelled into Italy j then into
Egypt, where he stayed a long time ; some say
three, — =- some say thirteen years. It is said, he
went farther, into Babylonia : this is uncertain.
Returning to Athens, he gave lessons, in the
Academy, to those whom his fame drew thither ;
and died, as we have received it, in the act of
writing, at eighty-one years.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We
are to account for the supreme elevation of this
mail} in the intellectual history of our race, — how
it happens that, in proportion to the culture of
men, they become his scholars ; that, as our
Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the table-
talk and household life of every man and woman
in the European and American nations, so the
writings of Plato have preoccupied every school
cf learning, every lover of thought, every church,
every poet, — making it impossible to think, on
certain levels, except through him. He stands
between the truth and every man's mind, and has
almost impressed language, and the primary forms
of thought, with his name and seal. I am struck,
in reading him, with the extreme modernness of
his style and spirit. Here is the germ of that
Europe we know so well, in its long history of

PLATO J OB, THE PHILOSOPHER. 49

arts and arms : here are all its traits, already dis*
cernible in the mind of Plato, — and in none before
him. It has spread itself since into a hundred
histories, but has added no new element. This
perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in
every work of art ; since the author of it was
not misled by any thing short-lived or local, but
abode by real and abiding traits. How Plato
came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and
almost literature, is the problem for us to
solve.

This could not have happened, without a sound,
sincere, and catholic man, able to honor, at the
same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and
fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a
nation, as of an individual, is the period of uncon-
scious strength. Children cry, scream, and
stamp with fury, unable to express their desires.
As soon as they can speak and tell their want,
and the reason of it, they become gentle. In
adult life, whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men
and women talk vehemently and superlatively,
blunder and quarrel : their manners are full of
desperation ; their speech is full of oaths. As
soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a
little, and they see them no longer in lumps and
masses, but accurately distributed, they desist
from that weak vehemence, and explain their
5

50 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

meaning in detail. If the tongue had not been
framed for articulation, man would still be a beast
in the forest. The same weakness and want,
on a higher plane, occurs daily in the education
of ardent young men and women. ' Ah ! you
don't understand me ; I have never met with any
one who comprehends me : ' and they sigh and
weep, write verses, and walk alone, — fault of
power to express their precise meaning. In a
month or two, through the favor of their good
genius, they meet some one so related as to assist
their volcanic estate ; and, good communication
being once established, they are thenceforward
good citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is
to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.

There is a moment, in the history of every
nation, when, proceeding out of this brute youth,
the perceptive powers reach their ripeness, and
have not yet become microscopic : so that man, at
that instant, extends across the entire scale ; and,
with his feet still planted on the immense forces
of night, converses, by his eyes and brain, with
solar and stellar creation. That is the moment
of adult health, the culmination of power.

Such is the history of Europe, in all points ; and
such in philosophy. Its early records, almost per-
ished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing
with them the dreams of barbarians ; a confusion

PLATO J OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 51

of crude notions of morals, and of natural philos-
ophy, gradually subsiding, through the partial
insight of single teachers.

Before Pericles, came the Seven Wise Masters ;
and we have the beginnings of geometry, meta-
physics, and ethics : then the partialists, — dedu-
cing the origin of things from flux or water, or from
air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with
these causes mythologic pictures. At last, comes
Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric
paint, or tattoo, or whooping ; for he can define.
He leaves with Asia the vast and superlative j he
is the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. " He
shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide
and define."

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the
account which the human mind gives to itself of
the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts
lie forever at the base ; the one, and the two. —
1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Yariety. We unite
all things, by perceiving the law which pervades
them ; by perceiving the superficial differences, and
the profound resemblances. But every mental
act, — this very perception of identity or oneness,
recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and
otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think,
without embracing both.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many

52 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

effects ; then for the cause of that ; and again the
cause, diving still into the profound : self-assured
that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient
one, — a one that shall be all. " In the midst of
the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is
truth, and in the midst of truth is the imperisha-
ble being," say the Vedas. All philosophy, of
east and west, has the same centripetence.
Urged by an opposite necessity, the mind returns
from the one, to that which is not one, but other
or many j from cause to effect ; and affirms the
necessary existence of variety, the self-existence
of both, as each is involved in the other.
These strictly-blended elements it is the prob-
lem of thought to separate, and to reconcile.
Their existence is mutually contradictory and
exclusive ; and each so fast slides into the other,
that we can never say what is one, and what it is
not. The Proteus is as nimble in the highest as
in the lowest grounds, when we contemplate the
one, the true, the good, — as in the surfaces and
extremities of matter.

In all nations, there are minds which incline to
dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity.
The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion
lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds
its highest expression in the religious writings of
the East, and chiefly, in the Indian Scriptures, in

PLATO ; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 53

the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu
Purana. Those writings contain little else than
this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains
in celebrating it.

The Same, the Same : friend and foe are of one
stuff : the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow,
are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so
much, that the variations of form are unimpor-
tant. " You are fit," (says the supreme Krishna to a
sage,) " to apprehend that you are not distinct from
me. That which I am, thou art, and that also is
this world, with its gods, and heroes, and man-
kind. Men contemplate distinctions, because
they are stupefied with ignorance." " The words
/ and mine constitute ignorance. What is the
great end of all, you shall now learn from me.
It is soul, — one in all bodies, pervading, uniform,
perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from
birth, growth, and decay, omnipresent, made up
of true knowledge, independent, unconnected
with unrealities, with name, species, and the rest,
in time past, present, and to come. The know-
ledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in
one's own, and in all other bodies, is the wisdom
of one who knows the unity of things. As one
diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a
flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so
the nature of the Great Spirit is single, though its
5*

54 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

forms be manifold, arising from the consequences
of acts. When the difference of the investing
form, as that of god, or the rest, is destroyed,
there is no distinction." " The whole world is
but a manifestation of Yishnu, who is identical
with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise,
as not differing from, but as the same as them-
selves. I neither am going nor coming j nor is my
dwelling in any one place ; nor art thou, thou ; nor
are others, others ; nor am I, I." As if he had
said, ' All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu ;
and animals and stars are transient paintings ; and
light is whitewash ; and durations are deceptive ;
and form is imprisonment ; and heaven itself a
decoy.' That which the soul seeks is resolution
into being, above form, out of Tartarus, and out
of heaven, — liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in
which all things are absorbed, action tends directly
backwards to diversity. The first is the course
or gravitation of mind ; the second is the power
of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity
absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and
creates. These two principles reappear and inter-
penetrate all things, all thought ; the one, the
many. One is being ; the other, intellect : one is
necessity ; the other, freedom : one, rest ; the other,
motion : one, power ; the other, distribution : one,

PLATO ; * OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 55

strength ; the other, pleasure : one, consciousness ;
the other, definition : one, genius ; the other, tal-
ent : one, earnestness ; the other, knowledge : one,
possession ; the other, trade : one, caste ; the other,
culture : one, king ; the other, democracy : and, if
we dare carry these generalizations a step higher,
and name the last tendency of both, we might
say, that the end of the one is escape from organ-
ization, — pure science ; and the end of the other is
the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or
executive deity.

Each student adheres, by temperament and by
habit, to the first or to the second of these gods
of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity ; by
intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too
rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to
parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of spec-
ulation.

To this partiality the history of nations cor-
responded. The country of unity, of immovable
institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting
in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and
in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable,
immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith
in the social institution of caste. On the other
side, the genius of Europe is active and creative :
it resists caste by culture ; its philosophy was a
discipline ; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade,

56 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West
delighted in boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the
extension of system, the sharpened understanding,
adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in man-
ifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles,
Athens, Greece, had been working in this ele-
ment with the joy of genius not yet chilled by
any foresight of the detriment of an excess.
They saw before them no sinister political econ-
omy ; no ominous Malthus ; no Paris or London ;
no pitiless subdivision of classes, — the doom of the
pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, of dressers,
of stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers ;
no Ireland ; no Indian caste, superinduced by the
efforts of Europe to throw it off. The under-
standing was in its health and prime. Art was
in its splendid novelty. They cut the Pentelican
marble as if it were snow, and their perfect works in
architecture and sculpture seemed things of course,
not more difficult than the completion of a new
ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at Lowell.
These things are in course, and may be taken for
granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine legisla-
tion, English trade, the saloons of Versailles,
the cafes of Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat,
steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective ; the

PLATO J OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 57

lown-meeting, the ballot-box, the newspaper and
cheap press.

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in eastern pil-
grimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which
all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia, and
the detail of Europe ; the infinitude of the Asiatic
soul, and the defining, result-loving, machine-
making, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe, —
Plato came to join, and by contact, to enhance
the energy of each. The excellence of Europe
and Asia are in his brain. Metaphysics and natu-
ral philosophy expressed the genius of Europe ;
he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive
of the two elements. It is as easy to be great as
to be small. The reason why we do not at once
believe in admirable souls, is because they are not
in our experience. In actual life, they are so
rare, as to be incredible ; but, primarily, there is
not only no presumption against them, but the
strongest presumption in favor of their appearance.
But whether voices were heard in the sky, or not ;
whether his mother or his father dreamed that the
infant man-child was the son of Apollo ; whether
a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not ; a man
who could see two sides of a thing was born.
The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature \

58 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

the upper and the under side of the medal of Jove ;
the union of impossibilities, which reappears in
every object ; its real and its ideal power, — was
now, also, transferred entire to the consciousness
of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract
truth, he saved himself by propounding the most
popular of all principles, the absolute good, which
rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made
transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by
drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained
by orators and polite conversers ; from mares and
puppies j from pitchers and soup-ladles ; from cooks
and criers j the shops of potters, horse-doctors,
butchers, and fishmongers. He cannot forgive
in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two
poles of thought shall appear in his statement.
His argument and his sentence are self-poised and
spherical. The two poles appear ; yes, and be-
come two hands, to grasp and appropriate their
own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis.
Our strength is transitional, alternating ; or, shall I
say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea
seen from shore, shore seen from sea ; the taste
of two metals in contact ; and our enlarged pow-
ers at the approach and at the departure of a
friend j the experience of poetic creativeness,

PLATO ; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 59

which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in
travelling, but in transitions from one to the other,
which must therefore be adroitly managed to pre-
sent as much transitional surface as possible ; this
command of two elements must explain the power
and the charm of Plato. Art expresses the one,
or the same by the different. Thought seeks to
know unity in unity ; poetry to show it by vari-
ety ; that is, always by an object or symbol.
Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one
of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both.
Things added to things, as statistics, civil history,
are inventories. Things used as language are
inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly
the obverse and the reverse of the medal of
Jove.

To take an example : — The physical philoso-
phers had sketched each his theory of the world ;
the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit ;
theories mechanical and chemical in their genius.
Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all
natural laws and causes, feels these, as second
causes, to be no theories of the world, but bare
inventories and lists. To the study of nature he
therefore prefixes the dogma, — " Let us declare
the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to pro-
duce and compose the universe. He was good ;
and he who is good has no kind of envy. Ex-

BO REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

empt from envy, he wished that all things should
be as much as possible like himself. Whosoever,
taught by wise men, shall admit this as the prime
cause of the origin and foundation of the world,
will be in the truth." "All things are for the
sake of the good, and it is the cause of every
thing beautiful." This dogma animates and im-
personates his philosophy.

The synthesis which makes the character of
his mind appears in all his talents. Where there
is great compass of wit, we usually find excellen-
cies that combine easily in the living man, but in
description appear incompatible. The mind of
Plato is not to be exhibited by a Chinese cata-
logue, but is to be apprehended by an original
mind in the exercise of its original power. In
him the freest abandonment is united with the
precision of a geometer. His daring imagination
gives him the more solid grasp of facts ; as the
birds of highest flight have the strongest alar
bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic elegance,
edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and par-
alyses, adorn the soundest health and strength of
frame. According to the old sentence, "If Jove
should descend to the earth, he would speak in
the style of Plato."

With this palatial air, there is, for the direct aim
of several of his works, and running through the

plato; oh, the philosopher. 61

tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which
mounts, in the Republic, and in the Phaedo, to
piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness
at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anec-
dotes that have come down from the times attest
his manly interference before the people in his
master's behalf, since even the savage cry of the
assembly to Plato is preserved ; and the indigna-
tion towards popular government, in many of his
pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has
a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor,
and a humanity which makes him tender for the
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes
that poetry, prophecy, and the high insight, are
from a wisdom of which man is not master ; that
the gods never philosophise ; but, by a celestial
mania, these miracles are accomplished. Horsed
on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions,
visits worlds which flesh cannot enter: he saw
the souls in pain ; he hears the doom of the
judge ; he beholds the penal metempsychosis ; the
Fates, with the rock and shears ; and hears the
intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One
would say, he had read the inscription on the gates
of Busyrane, — " Be bold ; " and on the second
gate, — " Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold : "
and then again had paused well at the third gate, —
6

62 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

"Be not too bold." His strength is like the
momentum of a falling planet ; and his discretion,
the return of its due and perfect curve, — so excel-
lent is his Greek love of boundary, and his skill
in definition. In reading logarithms, one is not
more secure, than in following Plato in his flights.
Nothing can be colder than his head, when the
lightnings of his imagination are playing in the
sky. He has finished his thinking, before he
brings it to the reader ; and he abounds in the
surprises of a literary master. He has that opu-
lence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise
Aveapon he needs. As the rich man wears no
more garments, drives no more horses, sits in no
more chambers, than the poor, — but has that
one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is fit
for the hour and the need : so Plato, in his plenty,
is never restricted, but has the fit word. There
is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory of wit
which he did not possess and use, — epic, analysis,
mania, intuition, music, satire, and irony, down
to the customary and polite. His illustrations are
poetry, and his jests illustrations. Socrates' pro-
fession of obstetric art is good philosophy ; and his
finding that word " cookery," and " adulatory art,"
for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial
service still. No orator can measure in effect with
him who can give good nicknames.

63

What moderation, and understatement, and
checking his thunder in mid volley ! He has
good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen
with all that can be said against the schools.
" For philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one
modestly meddles with it ; hut, if he is conver-
sant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts
the man." He could well afford to be generous, —
he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach of
his vision, had a faith without cloud. Such as his
perception, was his speech : he plays with the
doubt, and makes the most of it : he paints and
quibbles ; and by and by comes a sentence that
moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest
comes not only at intervals, in the perfect yes
and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light.
" I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these
accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my
soul before the judge in a healthy condition.
Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most
men value, and looking to the truth, I shall
endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can ;
and, when I die, to die so. And I invite all other
men, to the utmost of my power j and you, too, I
in turn invite to this contest, which, I affirm,
surpasses all contests here."

He is a great average man ; one who, to the best
thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his

64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams
and glimpses made available, and made to pass
for what they are. A great common sense is his
warrant and qualification to be the world's inter-
preter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and
poetic class have : but he has, also, what they
have not, — this strong solving sense to reconcile
his poetry with the appearances of the world,
and build a bridge from the streets of cities to
the Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but
slopes his thought, however picturesque the pre-
cipice on one side, to an access from the plain.
He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into
poetic raptures.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could
prostrate himself on the earth, and cover his
eyes, whilst he adored that which cannot be
numbered, or guaged, or known, or named : that
of which every thing can be affirmed and denied :
that " which is entity and nonentity." He called
it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the
Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so, — that
this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No
man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable.
Having paid his homage, as for the human race,
to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the
human race affirmed, l And yet things are know-

65

able ! ' — that is, the Asia in his mind was first
heartily honored, — the ocean of love and power,
before form, before will, before knowledge, the
Same, the Good, the One ; and now, refreshed and
empowered by this worship, the instinct of
Europe, namely, culture, returns ; and he cries,
Yet things are knowable ! They are knowable,
because, being from one, things correspond.
There is a scale : and the correspondence of
heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to
the whole, is our guide. As there is a science
of stars, called astronomy ; a science of quantities,
called mathematics ; a science of qualities, called
chemistry ; so there is a science of sciences, — I
call it Dialectic, — which is the Intellect discrim-
inating the false and the true. It rests on the
observation of identity and diversity ; for, to judge,
is to unite to an object the notion which belongs
to it. The sciences, even the best, — mathematics,
and astronomy, — are like sportsmen, who seize
whatever prey offers, even without being able to
make any use of it. Dialectic must teach the use
of them. " This is of that rank that no intel-
lectual man will enter on any study for its own
sake, but only with a view to advance himself in
that one sole science which embraces all."

" The essence or peculiarity of man is to com-
prehend a whole ; or that which, in the diversity
6*

66 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

of sensations, can be comprised under a rational
unity." " The soul which has never perceived
the truth, cannot pass into the human form." I
announce to men the Intellect. I announce the
good of being interpenetrated by the mind that
made nature : this benefit, namely, that it can
understand nature, which it made and maketh.
Nature is good, but intellect is better : as the law-
giver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy,
O sons of men ! that truth is altogether whole-
some ; that we have hope to search out what
might be the very self of every thing. The
misery of man is to be baulked of the sight of
essence, and to be stuffed with conjectures : but
the supreme good is reality ; the supreme beauty
is reality ; and all virtue and all felicity depend
on this science of the real : for courage is nothing
else than knowledge : the fairest fortune that can
befall man, is to be guided by his daemon to that
which is truly his own. This also is the essence
of justice, — to attend every one his own : nay, the
notion of virtue is not to be arrived at, except
through direct contemplation of the divine essence.
Courage, then ! for, " the persuasion that we must
search that which we do not know, will render
us, beyond comparison, better, braver, and more
industrious, than if we thought it impossible to
discover what we do not know, and useless to

67

search for it." He secures a position not to be
commanded, by his passion for reality ; valuing
philosophy only as it is the pleasure of con-
versing with real being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said,
Culture. He saw the institutions of Sparta, and
recognized more genially, one would say, than
any since, the hope of education. He delighted
in every accomplishment, in every graceful and
useful and truthful performance ; above all, in the
splendors of genius and intellectual achievement.
" The whole of life, O Socrates, said Glauco, is,
with the wise, the measure of hearing such dis-
courses as these." What a price he sets on the
feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of
Isocrates, of Parmenides ! What price, above
price, on the talents themselves ! He called the
several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation.
What value he gives to the art of gymnastic in
education ; what to geometry ; what to music ;
what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medi-
cinal power he celebrates ! In the Timseus. he
indicates the highest employment of the eyes.
" By us it is asserted, that God invented and
bestowed sight on us for this purpose, — that,
on surveying the circles of intelligence in the
heavens, we might properly employ those of our
own minds, which, though disturbed when com-

68 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

pared with the others that are uniform, are
still allied to their circulations ; and that, having
thus learned, and being naturally possessed of
a correct reasoning faculty, we might, by imi-
tating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set
right our own wanderings and blunders." And
in the Republic, — " By each of these disci-
plines, a certain organ of the soul is both purified
and reanimated, which is blinded and buried by
studies of another kind ; an organ better worth
saving than ten thousand eyes, ' since truth is
perceived by this alone."

He said, Culture ; but he first admitted its
basis, and gave immeasurably the first place to
advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid
stress on the distinctions of birth. In the doc-
trine of the organic character and disposition is
the origin of caste. " Such as were fit to govern,
into their composition the informing Deity min-
gled gold : into the military, silver ; iron and
brass for husbandmen and artificers." The East
confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The
Koran is explicit on this point of caste. " Men
have their metal, as of gold and silver. Those
of you who were the worthy ones in the state of
ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state
of faith, as soon as you embrace it." Plato was
not less firm. " Of the five orders of things, only

PLATO J OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 69

four can be taught to the generality of men."
In the Republic, he insists on the temperaments
of the youth, as first of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature,
is in the dialogue with the young Theages, who
wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates
declares that, if some have grown wise by asso-
ciating with him, no thanks are due to him ; but,
simply, whilst they were with him, they grew
wise, not because of him ; he pretends not to
know the way of it. "It is adverse to many,
nor can those be benefited by associating with
me, whom the Dsmon opposes ; so that it is not
possible for me to live with these. With many,
however, he does not prevent me from convers-
ing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating
with me. Such, O Theages, is the association
with me ; for, if it pleases the God, you will make
great and rapid proficiency : you will not, if he
does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to
be instructed by some one of those who have
power over the benefit which they impart to
men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it
may happen." As if he had said, * I have no
system. I cannot be answerable for you. You
will be what you must. If there is love between
us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our
intercourse be ; if not, your time is lost, and you

70 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid,
and the reputation I have, false. Quite above us,
beyond the will of you or me, is this secret affinity
or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and
I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my
business.'

He said, Culture ; he said, Nature : and he
failed not to add, ' There is also the divine. '
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly
tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes
a huge instrumentality of means. Plato, lover
of limits, loved the illimitable, saw the enlarge-
ment and nobility which come from truth itself
and good itself, and attempted, as if on the
part of the human intellect, once for all, to do it
adequate homage, — homage fit for the immense
soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the
intellect to render. He said, then, l Our faculties
run out into infinity, and return to us thence.
We can define but a little way ; but here is a fact
which will not be skipped, and which to shut our
eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale ;
and, begin where we will, ascend and ascend.
All things are symbolical; and what we call
results are beginnings.'

A key to the method and completeness of Plato
is his twice bisected line. After he has illustrated
the relation between the absolute good and true,

PLATO ,* OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 71

and the forms of the intelligible world, he says : —
u Let there be a line cut in two unequal parts.
Cut again each of these two parts, — one represent-
ing the visible, the other the intelligible world, —
and these two new sections, representing the bright
part and the dark part of these worlds, you will
have, for one of the sections of the visible world, —
images, that is, both shadows and reflections ; for
the other section, the objects of these images, —
that is, plants, animals, and the works of art and
nature. Then divide the intelligible world in
like manner ; the one section will be of opinions
and hypotheses, and the other section, of truths."
To these four sections, the four operations of the
soul correspond, — conjecture, faith, understand-
ing, reason. As every pool reflects the image of
the sun, so every thought and thing restores us
an image and creature of the supreme Good.
The universe is perforated by a million channels
for his activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension j in Phaedrus,
teaching that beauty is the most lovely of all
things, exciting hilarity, and shedding desire and
confidence through the universe, wherever it en-
ters ; and it enters, in some degree, into all things :
but that there is another, which is as much more
beautiful than beauty, as beauty is than chaos;
namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of

72 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be seen,
would ravish us with its perfect reality." He has
the same regard to it as the source of excellence in
works of art. " When an artificer, in the fabri-
cation of any work, looks to that which always
subsists according to the same ; and, employing a
model of this kind, expresses its idea and power
in his work ; it must follow, that his production
should be beautiful. But when he beholds that
which is born and dies, it will be far from beau-
tiful."

Thus ever : the Banquet is a teaching in the
same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry, and to
all the sermons of the world, that the love of
trie sexes is initial ; and symbolizes, at a distance,
the passion of the soul for that immense lake of
beauty it exists to seek. This faith in the Divin-
ity is never out of miud, and constitutes the lim-
itation of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach
wisdom ; — God only. In the same mind, he
constantly affirms that virtue cannot be taught j
that it is not a science, but an inspiration ; that
the greatest goods are produced to us through
mania, and are assigned to us by a divine gift.

This leads me to that central figure, which he
has established in his Academy, as the organ
through which every considered opinion shall be
announced, and whose biography he has likewise

PLATO ; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 73

so labored, that the historic facts are lost in the
light of Plato's mind. Socrates and Plato are the
double star, which the most powerful instruments
will not entirely separate. Socrates, again, in his
traits and genius, is the best example of that
synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary
power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but
honest enough ; of the commonest history ; of a
personal homeliness so remarkable, as to be a
cause of wit in others, — the rather that his broad
good nature and exquisite taste for a joke invited
the sally, which was sure to be paid. The play-
ers personated him on the stage ; the potters copied
his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool
fellow, adding to his humor a perfect temper, and
a knowledge of his man, be he who he might
whom he talked with, which laid the companion
open to certain defeat in any debate, — and in
debate he immoderately delighted. The young
men are prodigiously fond of him, and invite him
to their feasts, whither he goes for conversation.
He can drink, too ; has the strongest head in
Athens ; and, after leaving the whole party under
the table, goes away, as if nothing had happened,
to begin new dialogues with somebody that is
sober. In short, he was what our country-
people call an old one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was
7

74 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, never
willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old
characters, valued the bores and philistines,
thought every thing in Athens a little better than
any thing in any other place. He was plain as a
Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases,
and illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans
and sycamore-spoons, grooms and farriers, and
unnameable offices, — especially if he talked
with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-
like wisdom. Thus, he showed one who was
afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no
more than his daily walk within doors, if contin-
uously extended, would easily reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, —
an immense talker, — the rumor ran, that, on one
or two occasions, in the war with Bceotia, he had
shown a determination which had covered the
retreat of a troop ; and there was some story
that, under cover of folly, he had, in the city gov-
ernment, when one day he chanced to hold a seat
there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the
popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him.
He is very poor ; but then he is hardy as a soldier,
and can live on a few olives ; usually, in the
strictest sense, on bread and water, except when
entertained by his friends. His necessary ex-
penses were exceedingly small, and no one could

PLATO J OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 75

live as ho did. He wore no under garment ; his
upper garment was the same for summer and win-
ter ; and he went barefooted ; and it is said that,
to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking
at his ease all day with the most elegant and cul-
tivated young men, he will now and then return
to his shop, and carve statues, good or bad, for
sale. However that be, it is certain that he had
grown to delight in nothing else than this conver-
sation ; and that, under his hypocritical pretence
of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down
all the line speakers, all the fine philosophers of
Athens, whether natives, or strangers from Asia
Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk
with him, he is so honest, and really curious to
know ; a man who was willingly confuted, if he
did not speak the truth, and who willingly con-
futed others, asserting what was false ; and not less
pleased when confuted than when confuting ; for
he thought not any evil happened to men, of such
a magnitude as false opinion respecting the just
and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows
nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering
intelligence no man had ever reached ; whose
temper was imperturbable ; whose dreadful logic
was always leisurely and sportive ; so careless and
ignorant, as to disarm the wariest, and draw them,
in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts

76 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

and confusion. But he always knew the way
out ; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape ;
he drives them to terrible crtoices by his dilem-
mas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases, with
their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls.
The tyrannous realist ! — Meno has discoursed
a thousand times, at length, on virtue, before
many companies, and very well, as it appeared to
him; but, at this moment, he caimot even tell
what it is, — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has
so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange con-
ceits, drollery, and bonhommie, diverted the young
patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and
quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in the
sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic,
and to be either insane, or, at least, under cover
of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When
accused before the judges of subverting the popu-
lar creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul,
the future reward and punishment ; and, refusing
to recant, in a caprice of the popular government,
was condemned to die, and sent to the prison.
Socrates entered the prison, and took away all
ignominy from the place, which could not be a
prison, whilst he was there. Crito bribed the
jailer j but Socrates would not go out by treach-
ery. " Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is

to be preferred before justice. These things I
hear like pipes and drums, whose sound makes
me deaf to every thing you say." The fame of
this prison, the fame of the discourses there, and
the drinking of the hemlock, are one of the most
precious passages in the history of the world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the
droll and the martyr, the keen street and market
debater with the sweetest saint known to any
history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind
of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts ; and
the figure of Socrates, by a necessity, placed
itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest
dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to
communicate. It was a rare fortune, that this
iEsop of the mob, and this robed scholar, should
meet, to make each other immortal in their
mutual faculty. The strange synthesis, in the
character of Socrates, capped the synthesis in the
mind of Plato. Moreover, by this means, he was
able, in the direct way, and without envy, to avail
himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to
which unquestionably his own debt was great ;
and these derived again their principal advantage
from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say, that the defect of Plato in
power is only that which results inevitably from

his quality. He is intellectual in his aim ; and,

7 #

78 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into
heaven, diving into the pit, expounding the laws
of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of
crime, the hope of the parting soul, — he is literary,
and never otherwise. It is almost the sole de-
duction from the merit of Plato, that his writings
have not, — what is, no doubt, incident to this
regnancy of intellect in his work, — the vital
authority which the screams of prophets and the
sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess.
There is an interval ; and to cohesion, contact is
necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this
criticism, but that we have come to a fact in the
nature of things : an oak is not an orange. The
qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those
of salt, with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The
dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He
attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory
is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks
he means this ; and another, that : he has said
one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in
another place. He is charged with having failed
to make the transition from ideas to matter.
Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not
the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch
nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or

PLATO J OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 79

second thought ; but the theory of the world is a
thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.
Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known
and accurate expression for the world, and it
should be accurate. It shall be the world passed
through the mind of Plato, — nothing less. Every
atom shall have the Platonic tinge ; every atom,
every relation or quality you knew before, you
shall know again, and find here, but now ordered ;
not nature, but art. And you shall feel that
Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses,
some countries of the planet ; but countries, and
things of which countries are made, elements,
planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have
passed through this man as bread into his body,
and become no longer bread, but body : so all
this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has
clapped copyright on the world. This is the
ambition of individualism. But the mouthful
proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will
to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the
attempt ; and biting, gets strangled : the bitten
world holds the biter fast by his own teeth.
There he perishes : unconquered nature lives on,
and forgets him. So it fares with all : so must it
fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato
turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He

REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

argues on this side, and on that. The aeutest
German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell
what Platonism was j indeed, admirable texts
can be quoted on both sides of every great
question from him.

These things we are forced to say, if we must
consider the effort of Plato, or of any philosopher,
to dispose of Nature, — which will not be dis-
posed of. No power of genius has ever yet had
the smallest success in explaining existence.
The perfect enigma remains. But there is an
injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato.
Let us not seem to treat with flippancy his ven-
erable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect,
have admitted his transcendant claims. The
way to know him, is to compare him, not with
nature, but with other men. How many ages
have gone by, and he remains unapproached ! A
chief structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the
mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it
requires all the breadth of human faculty to know
it. I think it is trueliest seen, when seen with the
most respect. His sense deepens, his merits
multiply, with study. When Ave say, here is a
fine collection of fables ; or, when we praise the
style ; or the common sense ; or arithmetic ; we
speak as boys, and much of our impatient crit-
icism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no better.

PLATO J OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 81

The criticism is like our impatience of miles,
when we are in a hurry ; but it is still best that
a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty-
yards. The great-eyed Plato proportioned the
lights and shades after the genius of our life.

PLATO: NEW READINGS

The publication, in Mr. Bonn's " Serial Libra-
ry," of the excellent translations of Plato, which
we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap
press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take
hastily a few more notes of the elevation and
bearings of this fixed star ; or, to add a bulletin,
like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generaliza-
tion, has learned to indemnify the student of man
for the defects of individuals, by tracing growth
and ascent in races ; and, by the simple expedient
of lighting up the vast background, generates a
feeling of complacency and hope. The human
being has the saurian and the plant in his rear.
His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain,
look glorious when prospectively beheld from the
distant brain of ox, crocodile, and fish. It seems
as if nature, in regarding the geologic night be-
hind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she

PLATO : NEW READINGS. 83

had turned out five or six men, as Homer. Phidias,
Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented
with the result. These samples attested the virtue
of the tree. These were a clear amelioration of
trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for further
proceeding. With this artist, time and space are
cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of
tedious preparation. She waited tranquilly the
flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be
struck when man should arrive. Then periods
must pass before the motion of the earth can be
suspected ; then before the map of the instincts
and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as
of races, so the succession of individual men is
fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the fortune, in
the history of mankind, to mark an epoch.

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or
on any masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning, or
on any thesis, as, for example, the immortality of
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school-
man, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar
message. He represents the privilege of the in-
tellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every
fact to successive platforms, and so disclosing, in
every fact, a germ of expansion. These expan-
sions are in the essence of thought. The natu-
ralist would never help us to them by any discov-
eries of the extent of the universe, but is as poor,

84 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

when cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion,
as when measuring the angles of an acre. But
the Republic of Plato, by these expansions,
may be said to require, and so to anticipate, the
astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are or-
ganic. The mind does not create what it per-
ceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing
them, we only say, here was a more complete
man, who could apply to nature the whole scale
of the senses, the understanding, and the reason.
These expansions, or extensions, consist in contin-
uing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on
our natural vision, and, by this second sight, dis-
covering the long lines of law which shoot in
every direction. Everywhere he stands on a
path which has no end, but runs continuously
round the universe. Therefore, every word be-
comes an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks
upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses.
His perception of the generation of contraries, of
death out of life, and life out of death, — that law
by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposi-
tion, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals
of a new creation ; his discernment of the little in
the large, and the large in the small ; studying the
state in the citizen, and the citizen in the state ;
and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the

PLATO : NEW READINGS. 85

Republic as an allegory on the education of the pri-
vate soul ; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time,
of form, of figure, of the line, sometimes hypotheti-
cally given, as his defining of virtue, courage,
justice, temperance ; his love of the apologue, and
his apologues themselves ; the cave of Tropho-
nius j the ring of Gyges j the charioteer and two
horses ; the golden, silver, brass, and iron temper-
aments ; Theuth and Thamus ; and the visions
of Hades and the Fates, — ■ fables which have im-
printed themselves in the human memory like the
signs of the zodiac j his soliform eye and his bo-
niform soul ; his doctrine of assimilation ; his doc-
trine of reminiscence ; his clear vision of the laws
of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice
throughout the universe, instanced every where,
but specially in the doctrine, " what comes from
God to us, returns from us to God," and in Soc-
rates' belief that the laws below are sisters of the
laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclu-
sions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science
and virtue ; for vice can never know itself and
virtue ; but virtue knows both itself and vice.
The eye attested that justice was best, as long as
it was profitable ; Plato affirms that it is profitable
throughout ; that the profit is intrinsic, though the
just conceal his justice from gods and men j that
8

86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

it is better to suffer injustice, than to do it ; that
the sinner ought to covet punishment ; that the
lie was more hurtful than homicide ; and that ig-
norance, or the involuntary lie, was more calami-
tous than involuntary homicide ; that the soul is
unwillingly deprived of true opinions ; and that
no man sins willingly ; that the order or proceed-
ing of nature was from the mind to the body ;
and, though a sound body cannot restore an un-
sound mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue,
render the body the best possible. The intelligent
have a right over the ignorant, namely, the right
of instructing them. The right punishment of
one out of tune, is to make him play in tune ; the
fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to
pay, is, to be governed by a worse man ; that his
guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall
be instructed that there is gold and silver in their
souls, which will make men willing to give them
every thing which they need.

This second sight explains the stress laid on
geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was
not more lawful and precise than was the super-
sensible ; that a celestial geometry was in place
there, as a logic of lines and angles here below ;
that the world was throughout mathematical j the
proportions are constant of oxygen, azote, and
lime j there is just so much water, and slate, and

PLATO I NEW READINGS. 87

magnesia ; not less are the proportions constant of
the moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and false-
hood, delighted in revealing the real at the base
of the accidental j in discovering connection, con-
tinuity, and representation, everywhere ; hating
insulation ; and appears like the god of wealth
among the cabins of vagabonds, opening power
and capability in every thing he touches. Ethical
science was new and vacant, when Plato could
write thus : — " Of all whose arguments are left to
the men of the present time, no one has ever yet
condemned injustice, or praised justice, otherwise
than as respects the repute, honors, and emolu-
ments arising therefrom ; while, as respects either
of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power
in the soul of the possessor, and concealed both
from gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently
investigated, either in poetry or prose writings, —
how, namely, that the one is the greatest of all
the evils that the soul has within it, and justice
the greatest good."

His definition of ideas, as what is simple,
permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever
discriminating them from the notions of the
understanding, marks an era in the world. He
was born to behold the self-evolving power of
spirit, endless generator of new ends ; a power

88

REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

which is the key at once to the centrality and
the evanescence of things. Plato is so centred,
that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the
fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the
fact of eternity j and the doctrine of reminiscence
he offers as the most probable particular explica-
tion. Call that fanciful, — it matters not : the
connection between our knowledge and the abyss
of being is still real, and the explication must be
not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in spec-
ulation. He wrote on the scale of the mind
itself, so that all things have symmetry in his
tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness,
and descended into detail with a courage like
that he witnessed in nature. One would say,
that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm,
or a district, or an island, in intellectual geography,
but that Plato first drew the sphere. He domes-
ticates the soul in nature : man is the microcosm.
All the circles of the visible heaven represent as
many circles in the rational soul. There is no
lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in
the action of the human mind. The names of
things, too, are fatal, following the nature of
things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by
their names, significant of a profound sense.
The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or man-

PLATO : NEW READINGS. 89

ifestation ; Saturn, the contemplative ; Jove, the
regal soul ; and Mars, passion. Venus is propor-
tion ; Calliope, the soul of the world ; Aglaia,
intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had ap-
peared often to pious and to poetic souls ; but this
well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes
with command, gathers them all up into rank
and gradation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries
the two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw
the intellectual values of the moral sentiment.
He describes his own ideal, when he paints in
Timaeus a god leading things from disorder into
order. He kindled a fire so truly in the centre,
that we see the sphere illuminated, and can
distinguish poles, equator, and lines of latitude,
every arc and node : a theory so averaged, so
modulated, that you would say, the winds of
ages had swept through this rhythmic structure,
and not that it was the brief extempore blotting
of one short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened
that a very well-marked class of souls, namely,
those who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an
ethico-intellectual expression to every truth, by
exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate
to it, are said to Platonise. Thus, Michel Angelo
is a Platonist, in his sonnets. Shakspeare is a
8*

90

REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Platonist, when he writes, " Nature is made better
by no mean, but nature makes that mean," or,

" He, that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story."

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude
only of Shakspeare's proper genius that hinders
him from being classed as the most eminent of
this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose
poem of " Conjugal Love," is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of
thought. The secret of his popular success is the
moral aim, which endeared him to mankind.
"Intellect," he said, "is king of heaven and of
earth ; " but, in Plato, intellect is always moral.
His writings have also the sempiternal youth of
poetry. For their arguments, most of them,
might have been couched in sonnets : and poetry
has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and
the Phasdrus. As the poet, too, he is only con-
templative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break
himself with an institution. All his painting in
the Republic must be esteemed mythical, with
intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colors,
his thought. You cannot institute, without peril
of charlatan.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege

PLATO .* NEW READINGS. 91

for the best, (which, to make emphatic, he ex-
pressed by community of women,) as the premium
which he would set on grandeur. There shall
be exempts of two kinds : first, those who by
demerit have put themselves below protection, —
outlaws ; and secondly, those who by eminence
of nature and desert are out of the reach of your
rewards : let such be free of the city, and above
the law. We confide them to themselves ; let
them do with us as they will. Let none presume
to measure the irregularities of Michel Angelo
and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a
little mathematical dust in our eyes. I am sorry
to see him, after such noble superiorities, permit-
ting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence
a little with the baser sort, as people allow them-
selves with their dogs and cats.

SWEDENBORG;

THE MYSTIC

III.

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC

Among eminent persons, those who are most
dear to men are not of the class which the econ-
omist calls producers : they have nothing in their
hands ; they have not cultivated corn, nor made
bread ; they have not led out a colony, nor
invented a loom. A higher class, in the estima-
tion and love of this city-building, market-going
race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the
intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagi-
nation with ideas and pictures which raise men
out of the world of corn and money, and console
them for the short-comings of the day, and the
meannesses of labor and traffic. Then, also,
the philosopher has his value, who flatters the
intellect of this laborer, by engaging him with
subtleties which instruct him in new faculties.
Others may build cities ; he is to understand
them, and keep them in awe. But there is a

96 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

class who lead us into another region, — the world
of morals, or of will. What is singular about
this region of thought, is, its claim. Wherever
the sentiment of right comes in, it takes pre-
cedence of every thing else. For other things, I
make poetry of them ; but the moral sentiment
makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render
the greatest service to modern criticism, who shall
draw the line of relation that subsists between
Shakspeare and Swedenborg. The human mind
stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect,
demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each
without the other. The reconciler has not yet
appeared. If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare
is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently
teach, that the problem of essence must take pre-
cedence of all others, — the questions of Whence ?
What ? and Whither ? and the solution of these
must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama
or poem is a proximate or oblique reply ; but
Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on this prob-
lem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a
region of grandeur which reduces all material
magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch
that has reason the doors of the universe. Almost
with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man.
In the language of the Koran, " God said, the

SWEDENBORG J OR, THE MYSTIC. 97

heaven and the earth, and all that is "between
them, think ye that we created them in jest, and
that ye shall not return to us ? " It is the king-
dom of the will, and by inspiring the will, which
is the seat of personality, seems to convert the
universe into a person j —

" The realms of being to no other bow,
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou."

All men are commanded by the saint. The
Koran makes a distinct class of those who are by
nature good, and whose goodness has an influence
on others, and pronounces this class to be the
aim of creation : the other classes are admitted to
the feast of being, only as following in the train
of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul
of this kind, —

" Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet }
Thou art the called, — the rest admitted with thee."

The privilege of this caste is an access to the
secrets and structure of nature, by some higher
method than by experience. In common par-
lance, what one man is said to learn by experience,
a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without
experience, to divine. The Arabians say, that
Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the
9

98 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

philosopher, conferred together ; and, on parting,
the philosopher said, " All that he sees, I know ; "
and the mystic said, u x4.11 that he knows, I see."
If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the
solution would lead us into that property which
Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is
implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmi-
gration. The soul having been often born, or,
as the Hindoos say, " travelling the path of ex-
istence through thousands of births," having
beheld the things which are here, those which are
in heaven, and those which are beneath, there is
nothing of which she has not gained the know-
ledge : no wonder that she is able to recollect, in
regard to any one thing, what formerly she knew.
" For, all things in nature being linked and related,
and the soul having heretofore known all, nothing
hinders but that any man who has recalled to
mind, or, according to the common phrase, has
learned one thing only, should of himself recover
all his ancient knowledge, and find out again all
the rest, if he have but courage, and faint not in
the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learn-
ing is reminiscence all." How much more, if he
that inquires be a holy and godlike soul! For,
by being assimilated to the original soul, by
whom, and after whom, all things subsist, the
soul of man does then easily flow into all things,

SWEDENBORG ) OR, THE MYSTIC. 99

and all things flow into it : they mix ; and he is
present and sympathetic with their structure and
law.

This path is difficult, secret, and beset with
terror. The ancients called it ecstacy or ab-
sence, — a getting out of their bodies to think.
All religious history contains traces of the trance
of saints, — a beatitude, but without any sign
of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad ; " the flight,"
Plotinus called it, " of the alone to the alone;"
MvsffiSj the closing of the eyes, — whence our
word, Mystic. The trances of Socrates, Ploti-
nus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal,
Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind.
But what as readily comes to mind, is, the accom-
paniment of disease. This beatitude comes in
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the re-
ceiver. " It o'erinforms the tenement of clay,"
and drives the man mad ; or, gives a certain
violent bias, which taints his judgment. In the
chief examples of religious illumination, some-
what morbid has mingled, in spite of the unques-
tionable increase of mental power. Must the
highest good drag after it a quality which neu-
tralizes and discredits it ? —

" Indeed, it takes
From our achievements, when performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute."

100 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Shall we say, that the economical mother dis-
burses so much earth and so much fire, by weight
and metre, to make a man, and will not add a
pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a
leader ? Therefore, the men of God purchased
their science, by folly or pain. If you will have
pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the
brain transparent, the trunk and organs shall be
so much the grosser : instead of porcelain, they
are potter's earth, clay, or mud.

In modern times, no such remarkable example
of this introverted mind has occurred, as in Eman-
uel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688.
This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a
visionary, and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led
the most real life of any man then in the world :
and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics,
Cristierns, and Brunswicks, of that day, have slid
into oblivion, he begins to spread himself into the
minds of thousands. As happens in great men,
he seemed, by the variety and amount of his
powers, to be a composition of several persons, —
like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens
by the union of four or five single blossoms. His
frame is on a larger scale, and possesses the advan-
tages of size. As it is easier to see the reflection
of the great sphere in large globes, though de-
faced by some crack or blemish, than in drops of

SWEDENBORG J OR, THE MYSTIC. 101

water, so men of large calibre, though with some
eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton,
help us more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be ex-
traordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or
dance, but goes grubbing into mines and moun-
tains, prying into chemistry and optics, physiology,
mathematics, and astronomy, to find images fit for
the measure of his versatile and capacious brain.
He was a scholar from a child, and was edu-
cated at Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight, he
was made Assessor of the Board of Mines, by
Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four
years, and visited the universities of England,
Holland, France, and Germany. He performed a
notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege
of Fredericshall, by hauling two galleys, five
boats, and a sloop, some fourteen English miles
overland, for the royal service. In 1721, he jour-
neyed over Europe, to examine mines and smelting
works. He published, in 1716, his Daedalus Hy-
perboreus, and, from this time, for the next thirty
years, was employed in the composition and pub-
lication of his scientific works. With the like
force, he threw himself into theology. In 1743,
when he was fifty-four years old, what is called
his illumination began. All his metallurgy, and

transportation of ships overland, was absorbed into
9#

102 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any more sci-
entific books, withdrew from his practical labors,
and devoted himself to the writing and publica-
tion of his voluminous theological works, which
were printed at his own expense, or at that of the
Duke of Brunswick, or other prince, at Dresden,
Leipsic, London, or Amsterdam. Later, he re-
signed his office of Assessor : the salary attached
to this office continued to be paid to him during
his life. His duties had brought him into intimate
acquaintance with King Charles XII., by whom
he was much consulted and honored. The like
favor was continued to him by his successor. At
the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken says, the most
solid memorials on finance were from his pen. In
Sweden, he appears to have attracted a marked
regard. His rare science and practical skill, and
the added fame of second sight and extraordinary
religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens,
nobles, clergy, shipmasters, and people about the
ports through which he was wont to pass in his
many voyages. The clergy interfered a little
with the importation and publication of his reli-
gious works ; but he seems to have kept the
friendship of men in power. He was never mar-
ried. He had great modesty and gentleness of
bearing. His habits were simple ; he lived on
bread, milk, and vegetables ; he lived in a house

SWEDENBORG ] OR, THE MYSTIC. 103

situated in a large garden : he went several times
to England, where he does not seem to have at-
tracted any attention whatever from the learned
or the eminent ; and died at London, March 29,
1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He
is described, when in London, as a man of a quiet,
clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and
kind to children. He wore a sword when in full
velvet dress, and, whenever he walked out, carried
a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait
of him in antique coat and wig, but the face has
a wandering or vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science
of the age with a far more subtle science ; to pass
the bounds of space and time ; venture into the
dim spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new
religion in the world, — began its lessons in quar-
ries and forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible,
in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man
is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works
on so many subjects. One is glad to learn that
his books on mines and metals are held in the
highest esteem by those who understand these
matters. It seems that he anticipated much sci-
ence of the nineteenth century ; anticipated, in
astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet, —
but, unhappily, not also of the eighth ; anticipated
the views of modern astronomy in regard to the

104 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

generation of earths by the sun : in magnetism,
some important experiments and conclusions of
later students ; in chemistry, the atomic theory ;
in anatomy, the discoveries of Schlichting, Monro,
and Wilson ; and first demonstrated the office of
the lungs. His excellent English editor mag-
nanimously lays no stress on his discoveries, since
he was too great to care to be original ; and
we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what
remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times,
uncomprehended by them, and requires a long
focal distance to be seen ; suggests, as Aristotle,
Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness
of learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human
soul in nature, is possible. His superb speculation,
as from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever
losing sight of the texture and sequence of things,
almost realizes his own picture, in the " Principia,"
of the original integrity of man. Over and above
the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capi-
tal merit of his self-equality. A drop of water
has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a
storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as
of a flute ; strength of a host, as well as of a
hero ; and, in Swedenborg, those who are best
acquainted with modern books will most admire
the merit of mass. One of the missouriums and

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 105

mastodons of literature, he is not to be measured
by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His stal-
wart presence would nutter the gowns of an uni-
versity. Our books are false by being fragmenta-
ry : their sentences are bonmots, and not parts of
natural discourse ; childish expressions of surprise
or pleasure in nature ; or, worse, owing a brief
notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the
order of nature, — being some curiosity or oddity,
designedly not in harmony with nature, and pur-
posely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do
by concealing their means. But Swedenborg is
systematic, and respective of the world in every
sentence : all the means are orderly given ; his
faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and
this admirable writing is pure from all pertness or
egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of
great ideas. 'Tis hard to say what was his own :
yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures of the
universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with
its breadth and adequateness, shaming our sterile
and linear logic by its genial radiation, conversant
with series and degree, with effects and ends,
skilful to discriminate power from form, essence
from accident, and opening, by its terminology
and definition, high roads into nature, had trained
a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had

106 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

shown the circulation of the blood : Gilbert had
shown that the earth was a magnet : Descartes,
taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral,
and polarity, had filled Europe with the leading
thought of vortical motion, as the secret of nature.
Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was
born, published the " Principia," and established
the universal gravity. Malpighi, following the
high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that
nature works in leasts, — " tota in minimis existit
natura." Unrivalled dissectors, Swammerdam,
Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister,
Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel
or microscope to reveal in human or comparative
anatomy : Linnaeus, his contemporary, was af-
firming, in his beautiful science, that " Nature is
always like herself: " and, lastly, the nobility of
method, the largest application of principles, had
been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff,
in cosmology ; whilst Locke and Grotius had
drawn the moral argument. What was left for a
genius of the largest calibre, but to go over their
ground, and verify and unite ? It is easy to see,
in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg's studies,
and the suggestion of his problems. He had a
capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes of
thought. Yet the proximity of these geniuses, one

SWEDENBORG J OR, THE MYSTIC. 107

or other of whom had introduced all his leading
ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the
difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of
proving originality, the first birth and annuncia-
tion of one of the laws of nature.

He named his favorite views, the doctrine of
Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the
doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence.
His statement of these doctrines deserves to be
studied in his books. Not every man can read
them, but they will reward him who can. His
theologic works are valuable to illustrate these.
His writings would be a sufficient library to a
lonely and athletic student ; and the " Economy
of the Animal Kingdom " is one of those books
which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is
an honor to the human race. He had studied
spars and metals to some purpose. His varied
and solid knowledge makes his style lustrous
with points and shooting spicula of thought, and
resembling one of those winter mornings when
the air sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of
the topics makes the grandeur of the style. He
was apt for cosmology, because of that native
perception of identity which made mere size of
no account to him. In the atom of magnetic
iron, he saw the quality which would generate
the spiral motion of sun and planet.

108 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the
universality of each law in nature j the Platonic
doctrine of the scale or degrees ; the version or
conversion of each into other, and so the corre-
spondence of all the parts ; the fine secret that
little explains large, and large, little ; the central-
ity of man in nature, and the connection that
subsists throughout all things : he saw that the
human body was strictly universal, or an instru-
ment through which the soul feeds and is fed
by the whole of matter : so* that he held, in
exact antagonism to the skeptics, that, " the wiser
a man is, the more will he be a worshipper of
the Deity. 7 ' In short, he was a believer in the
Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as
the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he
experimented with and stablished through years
of labor, with the heart and strength of the
rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent
to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers,
and derives perhaps its best illustration from the
newest. It is this : that nature iterates her
means perpetually on successive planes. In the
old aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In
the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to
a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of
transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil,

SWEDENBORG ] OR, THE MYSTIC. 109

petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of
the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without
end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture,
and food, determining the form it shall assume.
In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine
of vertebras, and helps herself still by a new
spine, with a limited power of modifying its
form, — - spine on spine, to the end of the world.
A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that
a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being
an erect line, constitute a right angle • and, be-
tween the lines of this mystical quadrant, all
animated beings find their place : and he assumes
the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as
the type or prediction of the spine. Manifestly,
at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller
spines, as arms ; at the end of the arms, new spines,
as hands ; at the other end, she repeats the process,
as legs and feet. At the top of the column, she
puts out another spine, which doubles or loops
itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms
the skull, with extremities again : the hands be-
ing now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw,
the fingers and toes being represented this time
by upper and lower teeth. This new spine is
destined to high uses. It is a new man on the
shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its
trunk, and manage to live alone, according to the
10

110 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Platonic idea in the Timeeus. Within it, on a
higher plane, all that was done in the trunk re-
peats itself. Nature recites her lesson once more
in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body,
and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting,
absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new
and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all
the process of alimentation repeated, in the ac-
quiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating
of experience. Here again is the mystery of
generation repeated. In the brain are male and
female faculties : here is marriage, here is fruit.
And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but
series on series. Every thing, at the end of one
use, is taken up into the next, each series punc-
tually repeating every organ and process of the
last. We are adapted to infinity. We are hard
to please, and love nothing which ends : and in
nature is no end ; but every thing, at the end of
one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent
of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial
natures. Creative force, like a musical composer,
goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or
theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus,
ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth
and heaven with the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good .
but grander, when we find chemistry only an ex-

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. Ill

tension of the law of masses into particles, and
that the atomic theory shows the action of chem-
istry to be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows
us a sort of gravitation, operative also in the men-
tal phenomena ; and the terrible tabulation of the
French statists brings every piece of whim and
humor to be reducible also to exact numerical
ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in
thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grand-
mother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty
thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or
marries his grandmother. What we call gravita-
tion, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier
stream, for which we have yet no name. Astron-
omy is excellent ; but it must come up into life to
have its fall value, and not remain there in globes
and spaces. The globule of blood gyrates around
its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in
the sky ; and the circles of intellect relate to those
of the heavens. Each law of nature has the like
universality ; eating, sleep or hybernation, rota-
tion, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion,
which is seen in eggs as in planets. These grand
rhymes or returns in nature, — the dear, best-known
face startling us at every turn, under a mask so
unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger,
and, carrying up the semblance into divine forms, — -
delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg ; and

112 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution,
which, by giving to science an idea, has given to
an aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance
and form, and a beating heart.

I own, with some regret, that his printed works
amount to about fifty stout octavos, his scientific
works being about half of the whole number ; and
it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited
remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The
scientific works have just now been translated into
English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the
ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained
from that time neglected : and now, after their
century is complete, he has at last found a pupil
in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic,
with a coequal vigor of understanding and imagi-
nation comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who
has produced his master's buried books to the day,
and transferred them, with every advantage, from
their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the
world in our commercial and conquering tongue.
This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after
a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least re-
markable fact in his history. Aided, it is said, by
the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his
literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done.
The admirable preliminary discourses with which

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 113

Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw
all the cotemporary philosophy of England into
shade, and leave me nothing to say on their proper
grounds.

The " Animal Kingdom " is a book of wonder-
ful merits. It was written with the highest end, —
to put science and the soul, long estranged from
each other, at one again. It was an anatomist's
account of the human body, in the highest style
of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and bril-
liant treatment of a subject usually so dry and
repulsive. He saw nature " wreathing through
an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry,
on axes that never creak," and sometimes sought
" to uncover those secret recesses where nature is
sitting at the fires in the depths of her labora-
tory ; " whilst the picture comes recommended by
the hard fidelity with which it is based on practi-
cal anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime
genius decides, peremptorily for the analytic,
against the synthetic method ; and, in a book
whose genius is a daring poetic synthesis, claims
to confine himself to a rigid experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature,
and how wise was that old answer of Amasis to
him who bade him drink up the sea, — " Yes,
willingly, if you will stop the rivers that flow
in." Few knew as much about nature and her
10*

114 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her
goings. He thought as large a demand is made
on our faith by nature, as by miracles. " He
noted that in her proceeding from first principles
through her several subordinations, there was no
state through which she did not pass, as if her
path lay through ail things." " For as often as
she betakes herself upward from visible phenom-
ena, or, in other words, withdraws herself inward,
she instantly, as it were, disappears, while no one
knows what has become of her, or whither she
is gone : so that it is necessary to take science as
a guide in pursuing her steps."

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an
end or final cause, gives wonderful animation, a
sort of personality to the whole writing. This
book announces his favorite dogmas. The
ancient doctrine of Hippocrates, that the brain is
a gland; and of Leucippus, that the atom may
be known by the mass ; or, in Plato, the macro-
cosm by the microcosm ; and, in the verses of
Lucretius, —

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis ;
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis ;
lgnibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.

Lib. L 835.

SWEDENBORG J OR, THE MYSTIC. 115

" The principle of all things entrails made

Of smallest entrails ; bone, of smallest bone ;

Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one ;

Gold, of small grains ; earth, of small sands compacted ;

Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted : "

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim,
that "nature exists entire in leasts," — -is a favor-
ite thought of Swedenborg. "It is a constant
law of the organic body, that large, compound, or
visible forms exist and subsist from smaller, sim-
pler, and ultimately from invisible forms, which
act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly
and more universally j and the least forms so per-
fectly and universally, as to involve an idea repre-
sentative of their entire universe." The unities
of each organ are so many little organs, homoge-
neous with their compound : the unities of the
tongue are little tongues ; those of the stomach,
little stomachs ; those of the heart are little hearts.
This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret.
What was too small for the eye to detect was read
by the aggregates ; what was too large, by the
units. There is no end to his application of the
thought. " Hunger is an aggregate of very many
little hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins
all over the body." It is a key to his theology,
also. " Man is a kind of very minute heaven,
corresponding to the world of spirits and to

116 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

heaven. Every particular idea of man, and ev-
ery affection, yea, every smallest part of his affec-
tion, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may
be known from only a single thought. God is the
grand man."

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study
of nature required a theory of forms, also.
" Forms ascend in order from the loivest to the
highest. The lowest form is angular, or the ter-
restrial and corporeal. The second and next
higher form is the circular, which is also called
the perpetual-angular, because the circumference
of a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above
this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular
forms : its diameters are not rectilinear, but vari-
ously circular, and have a spherical surface for
centre ; therefore it is called the perpetual-circu-
lar. The form above this is the vortical, or per-
petual-spiral : next, the perpetual-vortical, or ce-
lestial : last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual."

Was it strange that a genius so bold should
take the last step, also, — conceive that he might
attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the
meaning of the world ? In the first volume of
the "Animal Kingdom," he broaches the subject,
in a remarkable note. —

" In our doctrine of Representations and Cor-
respondences, we shall treat of both these sym-

117

bolical and typical resemblances, and of the aston-
ishing things which occur, I will not say, in the
living body only, but throughout nature, and
which correspond so entirely to supreme and
spiritual things, that one would swear that the
physical world was purely symbolical of the spir-
itual world ; insomuch, that if we choose to ex-
press any natural truth in physical and definite
vocal terms, and to convert these terms only into
the corresponding and spiritual terms, we shall by
this means elicit a spiritual truth, or theological
dogma, in place of the physical truth or precept :
although no mortal would have predicted that
any thing of the kind could possibly arise by
bare literal transposition ; inasmuch as the one
precept, considered separately from the other,
appears to have absolutely no relation to it. I
intend, hereafter, to communicate a number of
examples of such correspondences, together with
a vocabulary containing the terms of spiritual
things, as well as of the physical things for which
they are to be substituted. This symbolism per-
vades the living body."

The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in
all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of em-
blems, and in the structure of language. Plato
knew of it, as is evident from his twice bisected
line, in the sixth book of the Republic. Lord

118 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Bacon had found that truth and nature differed
only as seal and print ; and he instanced some
physical propositions, with their translation into a
moral or political sense. Behmen, and all mys-
tics, imply this law, in their dark riddle-writing.
The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it ; but
it is known to them only, as the magnet was
known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first put
the fact into a detached and scientific statement,
because it was habitually present to him, and
never not seen. It was involved, as we explained
already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration,
because the mental series exactly tallies with the
material series. It required an insight that could
rank things in order and series ; or, rather, it re-
quired such Tightness of position, that the poles
of the eye should coincide with the axis of the
world. The earth had fed its mankind through
five or six milleniums, and they had sciences,
religions, philosophies ; and yet had failed to see
the correspondence of meaning between every
part and every other part. And, down to this
hour, literature has no book in which the symbol-
ism of things is scientifically opened. One would
say, that, as soon as men had the first hint that
every sensible object, — animal, rock, river, air, —
nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor
finally to a material end, but as a picture-language,

swedenborg; or, the mystic. 119

to tell another story of beings and duties, other
science would be put by, and a science of such
grand presage would absorb all faculties : that
each man would ask of all objects, what they
mean : Why does the horizon hold me fast, with
my joy and grief, in this centre ? Why hear I
the same sense from countless differing voices,
and read one never quite expressed fact in endless-
picture-language ? Yet, whether it be^that these
things will not be intellectually learned, or, that
many centuries must elaborate and compose so
rare and opulent a soul, — -there is no comet, rock-
stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus,
that, for itself, does not interest more scholars
and classifiers, than the meaning and upshot of
the frame of things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the
culinary use of the world. In his fifty-fourth
year, these thoughts held him fast, and his pro-
found mind admitted the perilous opinion, too
frequent in religious history, that he was an
abnormal person, to whom was granted the privi-
lege of conversing with angels and spirits ; and
this ecstasy connected itself with just this office
of explaining the moral import of the sensible
world. To a right perception, at once broad and
minute, of the order of nature, he added the
comprehension of the moral laws in their widest

120 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

social aspects ; but whatever he saw, through
some excessive determination to form, in his con-
stitution, he saw not abstractly, but in pictures,
heard it in dialogues, constructed it in eventSv
When he attempted to announce the law most
sanely, he was forced to Couch it in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example
of a deranged balance. The principal powers
continued to maintain a healthy action • and, to
a reader who can make due allowance in the
report for the reporter's peculiarities, the results
are still instructive, and a more striking testimony
to the sublime laws he announced, than any that
balanced dulness could afford. He attempts to
give some account of the modus of the new
state, affirming that " his presence in the spiritual
world is attended with a certain separation, but
only as to the intellectual part of his mind, not
as to the will part ; " and he affirms that "he
sees, with the internal sight, the things that are
in another life, more clearly than he sees the
things which are here in the world."

Having adopted the belief that certain books
of the Old and New Testaments were exact
allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic
mode, he employed his remaining years in extri-
cating from the literal, the universal sense. He
had borrowed from Plato the fine fable of " a

SWEDENBORGJ OR, THE MTtSTlC. 121

most ancient people, men better than we, and
dwelling nigher to the gods ; " and Swedenborg
added, that they used the earth symbolically j
that these, when they saw terrestrial objects, did
not think at all about them, but only about those
which they signified. The correspondence be-
tween thoughts and things henceforward occu-
pied him. " The very organic form resembles
the end inscribed on it." A man is in general,
and in particular, an organized justice or injustice,
selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this
harmony he assigned in the Arcana : " The rea-
son why all and single things, in the heavens and
on earth, are representative, is because they exist
from an influx of the Lord, through heaven."
This design of exhibiting such correspondences,
which, if adequately executed, would be the
poem of the world, in which all history and
science would play an essential part, was nar-
rowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic
direction which his inquiries took. His percep-
tion of nature is not human and universal, but is
mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural
object to a theologic notion; — a horse signifies
carnal understanding ; a tree, perception ; the
moon, faith ; a cat means this ; an ostrich, that ;
an artichoke, this other ; and poorly tethers every
symbol to a several ecclesiastic sense. The
11

12*2 REPRESENTATIVE MEN*

slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In
nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable
parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn
through every system. The central identity
enables any one symbol to express successively
all the qualities and shades of real being. In
the transmission of the heavenly waters, every
hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself
speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain
her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing
must be taken genially, and we must be at the
top of our condition, to understand any thing
rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his
interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of
symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter,
whom mankind must still expect, will find no
predecessor who has approached so near to the
true problem.

Swedenborg styles himself, in the title-page
of his books, " Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ ; "
and by force of intellect, and in effect, he is the
last Father in the Church, and is not likely to
have a successor. No wonder that his depth of
ethical wisdom should give him influence as a
teacher. To the withered traditional church
yielding dry catechisms, he let in nature again,
and the worshipper, escaping from the vestry of

swedenborg; or, the mystic. 123

verbs and texts, is surprised to find himself a
party to the whole of his religion. His religion
thinks for him, and is of universal application.
He turns it on every side ; it fits every part of
life, interprets and dignifies every circumstance.
Instead of a religion which visited him diplomat-
ically three or four times, — when he was born,
when he married, when he fell sick, and when
he died, and for the rest never interfered with
him, — here was a teaching which accompanied
him all day, accompanied him even into sleep
and dreams ; into his thinking, and showed him
through what a long ancestry his thoughts de-
scend ; into society, and showed by what affin-
ities he was girt to his equals and his counterparts ;
into natural objects, and showed their origin and
meaning, what are friendly, and what are hurtful ;
and opened the future world, by indicating the
continuity of the same laws. His disciples allege
that their intellect is invigorated by the study of
his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his
theological writings, their merits are so command-
ing ; yet such grave deductions must be made.
Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the
prairie, or the desert, and their incongruities are
like the last deiiration. He is superfluously ex-
planatory, and his feeling of the ignorance of men,

124 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this
nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions :
he is a rich discoverer, and of things which most
import us to know. His thought dwells in essen-
tial resemblances, like the resemblance of a
house to the man who built it. He saw things
in their law, in likeness of function, not of struc-
ture. There is an invariable method and order in
his delivery of his truth, the habitual proceeding
of the mind from inmost to outmost. What ear-
nestness and weightiness, — his eye never roving,
without one swell of vanity, or one look to self,
in any common form of literary pride ! a theoret-
ic or speculative man, but whom no practical man
in the universe could affect to scorn. Plato is a
gownsman : his garment, though of purple, and
almost sky-woven, is an academic robe, and hin-
ders action with its voluminous folds. But this
mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself
would bow.

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correc-
tion of popular errors, the announcement of ethi-
cal laws, take him out of comparison with any
other modern writer, and entitle him to a place,
vacant for some ages, among the lawgivers of
mankind. That slow but commanding influence
which he has acquired, like that of other reli-
gious geniuses, must be excessive also, and have

SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 125

its tides, before it subsides into a permanent
amount. Of course, what is real and universal
cannot be confined to the circle of those who
sympathize strictly with his genius, but will pass
forth into the common stock of wise and just
thinking. The world has a sure chemistry, by
which it extracts what is excellent in its children,
and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of the
grandest mind.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the
old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid,
and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there
objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien
will, — in Swedenborg's mind, has a more philo-
sophic character. It is subjective, or depends
entirely upon the thought of the person. All
things in the universe arrange themselves to each
person anew, according to his ruling love. Man
is such as his affection and thought are. Man is
man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of know-
ing and understanding. As he is, so he sees.
The marriages of the world are broken up. In-
teriors associate all in the spiritual world. What-
ever the angels looked upon was to them celestial.
Each Satan appears to himself a man ; to those
as bad as he, a comely man ; to the purified, a
heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states :
every thing gravitates : like will to like : what
11*

126 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot.
We have come into a world which is a living
poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast
is not bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia
of the minds and wills of men there present.
Every one makes his own house and state. The
ghosts are tormented with the fear of death, and
cannot remember that they have died. They
who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all
others. Such as have deprived themselves of
charity, wander and nee : the societies which
they approach discover their quality, and drive
them away. The covetous seem to themselves
to be abiding in cells where their money is
deposited, and these to be infested with mice.
They who place merit in good works seem to
themselves to cut wood. u I asked such, if
they were not wearied ? They replied, that
they have not yet done work enough to merit
heaven."

He delivers golden sayings, which express with
singular beauty the ethical laws ; as when he
uttered that famed sentence, that, "in heaven
the angels are advancing continually to the
spring-time of their youth, so that the oldest
angel appears the youngest : " " The more angels,
the more room : " " The perfection of man is
the love of use : " " Man, in his perfect form, is

swedenboeg; or, the mystic. 127

heaven : " " What is from Him, is Him : " " Ends
always ascend as nature descends : " And the
truly poetic account of the writing in the inmost
heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions accord-
ing to the form of heaven, can be read without
instruction. He almost justifies his claim to
preternatural vision, by strange insights of the
structure of the human body and mind. "It is
never permitted to any one, in heaven, to stand
behind another and look at the back of his head :
for then the influx which is from the Lord is
disturbed." The angels, from the sound of the
voice, know a man's love ; from the articulation
of the sound, his wisdom ; and from the sense
of the words, his science.

In the " Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the
science of marriage. Of this book, one would
say, that, with the highest elements, it has failed
of success. It came near to be the Hymn of
Love, which Plato attempted in the " Banquet ; "
the love, which, Dante says, Casella sang among
the angels in Paradise ; and which, as rightly
celebrated, in its genesis, fruition, and effect,
might well entrance the souls, as it would lay
open the genesis of all institutions, customs, and
manners. The book had been grand, if the He-
braism had been omitted, and the law stated with-
out Gothicism, as ethics, and with that scope for

128 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

ascension of state which the nature of things re-
quires. It is a fine Platonic development of the
science of marriage ; teaching that sex is univer-
sal, and not local ; virility in the male qualifying
every organ, act, and thought ; and the feminine
in woman. Therefore, in the real or spiritual
world, the nuptial union is not momentary, but
incessant and total ; and chastity not a local, but
a universal virtue ; unchastity being discovered as
much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or
philosophizing, as in generation ; and that, though*
the virgins he saw in heaven were beautiful, the
wives were incomparably more beautiful, and
went on increasing in beauty evermore.

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his
theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates the
circumstance of marriage ; and, though he finds
false marriages on earth, fancies a wiser choice in
heaven. But of progressive souls, all loves and
friendships are momentary. Do yon love me ?
means, Do you see the same truth ? If you do,
we are happy with the same happiness : but pres-
ently one of us passes into the perception of new
truth ; — we are divorced, and no tension in nature
can hold us to each other. I know how delicious
is this cup of love, — I existing for you, you ex-
isting for me ; but it is a child's clinging to his
toy ; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nup-

swedenborg; or, the mystic. 129

tial chamber ; to keep the picture-alphabet through
which our first lessons are prettily conveyed.
The Eden of God is bare and grand : like the
out-door landscape, remembered from the evening
fireside, it seems cold and desolate, whilst you
cower over the coals ; but, once abroad again, we
pity those who can forego the magnificence of
nature, for candle-light and cards. Perhaps the
true subject of the " Conjugal Love" is Conver-
sation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. It
is false, if literally applied to marriage. For God
is the bride or bridegroom of the soul. Heaven
is not the pairing of two, but the communion of
all souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under
the temple of one thought, and part as though we
parted not, to join another thought in other fel-
lowships of joy. So far from there being any
thing divine in the low and proprietary sense of
Do you love me ? it is only when you leave and
lose me, by casting yourself on a sentiment which
is higher than both of us, that I draw near, and
find myself at your side ; and I am repelled, if
you fix your eye on me, and demand love. In
fact, in the spiritual world, we change sexes
every moment. You love the worth in me ; then
I am your husband : but it is not me, but the
worth, that fixes the love ; and that worth is a
drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond me.

130 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

Meantime, I adore the greater worth in another,
and so become his wife. He aspires to a higher
worth in another spirit, and is wife or receiver of
that influence.

Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he grew
into, from jealousy of the sins to which men of
thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentan-
gling and demonstrating that particular form of
moral disease, an acumen which no conscience
can resist. I refer to his feeling of the profanation
of thinking to what is good "from scientifics."
" To reason about faith, is to doubt and deny."
He was painfully alive to the difference between
knowing and doing, and this sensibility is inces-
santly expressed. Philosophers are, therefore,
vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters,
and flying serpents ; literary men are conjurors
and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that
here we find the seat of his own pain. Possibly
Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted fac-
ulties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to
depend on a happy adjustment of heart and brain ;
on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral and
mental power, which, perhaps, obeys the law of
those chemical ratios which make a proportion in
volumes necessary to combination, as when gases

131

will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any
rate. It is hard to carry a full Gup : and this man^
profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into
dangerous discord with himself. In his Animal
Kingdom, he surprised us, by declaring that he
loved analysis, and not synthesis ; and now, after
his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy of his intel-
lect ; and, though aware that truth is not solitary 5
nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix
and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes the
part of the conscience against it, and, on all occa-
sions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence
is instantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love
is unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven,
is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men
of talent leads to satire, and destroys the judgment.
He is wise, but wise in his own despite. There
is an air of infinite grief, and the sound of wail-
ing, all over and through this lurid universe. A
vampyre sits in the seat of the prophet, and turns
with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. In-
deed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest,
or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of
the souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more
abominable than the last, round every new crew
of offenders. He was let down through a column
that seemed of brass, but it was formed of an-
gelic spirits, that he might descend safely amongst

132 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls ;
and heard there, for a long continuance, their
lamentations ; he saw their tormentors, who in-
crease and strain pangs to infinity ; he saw the
hell of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the
hell of the lascivious ; the hell of robbers, who
kill and boil men ; the infernal tun of the deceit-
ful ; the excrementitious hells ; the hell of the
revengeful, whose faces resembled a round, broad
cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except
Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such
science of filth and corruption.

These books should be used with caution. It
is dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images
of thought. True in transition, they become
false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehen-
sion, almost a genius equal to his own. But when
his visions become the stereotyped language of
multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and
capacity, they are perverted. The wise people
of the Greek race were accustomed to lead the
most intelligent and virtuous young men, as part,
of their education, through the Eleusinian mys-
teries, wherein, with much pomp and graduation,
the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were
taught. An ardent and contemplative young man,
at eighteen or twenty years, might read once
these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of

SWEDENBOKG ; OK, TH£ MYSTIC. 133

love and conscience, and then throw them aside
for ever. Genius is ever haunted by similar
dreams, when the hells and the heavens are
opened to it. But these pictures are to be held
as mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary and acci-
dental picture of the truth, — not as the truth.
Any other symbol would be as good : then this
is safely seen.

Swedenborg's system of the world %vants cen-
tral spontaneity j it is dynamic, not vital, and
lacks power to generate life, There is no indi-
vidual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal,
all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted
order, and with unbroken unity, but cold and
still. What seems an individual and a will, is
none. There is an immense chain of inter-
mediation, extending from centre to extremes,
which bereaves every agency of all freedom and
character. The universe, in his poem, suffers
under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the
mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes
into each mind by influence from a society of
spirits that surround it, and into these from a
higher society, and so on. All his types mean the
same few things. All his figures speak one
speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgise,
Be they who they may, to this complexion must
12

134 RE?IlESEN , rATIVE MEN.

they come at last. This Charon ferries them all
over in his boat ; kings, counsellors, cavaliers, doc-
tors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King
George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather
one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero
comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying
he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of
human relenting, remarks, " one whom it was
given me to believe was Cicero ; " and when the
soi disant Roman opens his mouth, Rome and
eloquence have ebbed away, — it is plain the-
ologic Swedenborg, like the rest. His heavens
and hells are dull ; fault of want of individualism.
The thousand-fold relation of men is not there.
The interest that attaches in nature to each man,
because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by
his right, because he defies all dogmatising and
classification, so many allowances, and contin-
gences, and futurities, are to be taken into ac-
count, strong by his vices, often paralysed by his
virtues, — sinks into entire sympathy with his
society. This want reacts to the centre of the
system. Though the agency of " the Lord " is
in every line referred to by name, it never
becomes alive. There is no lustre in that eye
which gazes from the centre, and which should
vivify the immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic

SWEDENBORG J OR, THE MYSTIC. 135

determination. Nothing with him has the liberal-
ity of universal wisdom, but we are always in a
church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the
lore of right and wrong to men, had the same
excess of influence for him, it has had for the
nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was
sacred. Palestine is ever the more valuable as a
chapter in universal history, and ever the less an
available element in education. The genius of
Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in this
department of thought, wasted itself in the
endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had
already arrived at its natural term, and, in the
great secular Providence, was retiring from its
prominence, before western modes of thought
and expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both
failed by attaching themselves to the Christian
symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which
carries innumerable Christianities, humanities,
divinities, in its bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in the
incongruous inportation of a foreign rhetoric.
'What have I to do,' asks the impatient reader,
' with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony ;
what with arks and passovers, ephahs and
ephods ; what with lepers and emerods ; what
with heave-offerings and unleavened bread ;
chariots of fire, dragons crowned and horned,

138 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

behemoth and unicorn ? Good for orientals, these
are nothing to me. The more learning you bring
to explain them, the more glaring the imper-
tinence. The more coherent and elaborate the
system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan,
" Why do you speak so much to the purpose, of
that which is nothing to the purpose ? " My learn-
ing is such as God gave me in my birth and habit,
in the delight and study of my eyes, and not of
another man's. Of all absurdities, this of some
foreigner, proposing to take away my rhetoric,
and substitute his own, and amuse me with peli-
can and stork, instead of thrush and robin ; palm-
trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and
hickory, — seems the most needless.'

Locke said, " God, when he makes the prophet,
does not unmake the man." Swedenborg's his-
tory points the remark. The parish disputes, in
the Swedish church, between the friends and foes
of Luther and Melancthon, concerning " faith
alone," and "works alone," intrude themselves
into his speculations upon the economy of the
universe, and of the celestial societies. The
Lutheran bishop's son, for whom the heavens are
opened, so that he sees with eyes, and in the rich-
est symbolic forms, the awful truth of things, and
utters again, in his books, as under a heavenly
mandate, the indisputable secrets of moral nature,

SWEDENBORG J OR, THE MYSTIC. 137

— with all these grandeurs resting upon him, re-
mains the Lutheran bishop's son ; his judgments
are those of a Swedish polemic, and his vast en-
largements purchased by adamantine limitations.
He carries his controversial memory with him, in
his visits to the souls. He is like Michel Angelo,
who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had
offended him to roast under a mountain of devils ;
or, like Dante, who avenged, in vindictive melo-
dies, all his private wrongs ; or, perhaps still more
like Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hail-storm
passes over the village, thinks the day of doom is
come, and the cannibals already have got the pip.
Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains
of Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, and his
own books, which he advertises among the angels.
Under the same theologic cramp, many of his
dogmas are bound. His cardinal position in
morals is, that evils should be shunned as sins.
But he does not know what evil is, or what good
is, who thinks any ground remains to be occupied,
after saying that evil is to be shunned as evil. I
doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the
element of personality of Deity. But nothing is
added. One man, you say, dreads erysipelas, —
show him that this dread is evil : or, one dreads
hell, — show him that dread is evil. He who
loves goodness, harbors angels, reveres reverence,
12*

138 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

and lives with God. The less we have to do with
our sins, the better. No man ean afford to waste
his moments in compunctions. " That is active
duty," say the Hindoos, "which is not for our
bondage ; that is knowledge, which is for our lib-
eration : all other duty is good only unto weari-
ness."

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious
theologic limitation, is this Inferno. Swedenborg
has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers,
is good in the making. That pure malignity can
exist, is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It
is not to be entertained by a rational agent ; it is
atheism ; it is the last profanation. Euripides
rightly said, —

*' Goodness and being in the gods are one ;

He who imputes ill to them makes them none."

To what a painful perversion had Gothic the-
ology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no con-
version for evil spirits! But the divine effort is
never relaxed ; the carrion in the sun will convert
itself to grass and flowers : and man, though in
brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to
all that is good and true. Burns, with the wild
humor of his apostrophe to " poor old Nickie Ben,"

" O wad ye tak a thought, and mend ! "

swedenborg; or, the mystic. 139

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian.
Every thing is superficial, and perishes, but love
and truth only. The largest is always the truest
sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit
of the Indian Vishnu, — " 1 am the same to all
mankind. There is not one who is worthy of my
love or hatred. They who serve me with adora-
tion, — I am in them, and they in me. If one
whose ways are altogether evil, serve me alone, he
is as respectable as the just man ; he is altogether
well employed ; he soon becometh of a virtuous
spirit, and obtaineth eternal happiness."

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations
of the other world, — only his probity and genius
can entitle it to any serious regard. His revela-
tions destroy their credit by running into detail.
If a man say, that the Holy Ghost has informed
him that the Last Judgment, (or the last of the
judgments,) took place in 1757; or, that the
Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven by
themselves, and the English, in a heaven by
themselves ; I reply, that the Spirit which is
holy, is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws.
The rumors of ghosts and hobgoblins gossip
and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high
Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard to particu-
lars, negative. Socrates's Genius did not advise
him to act or to find, but if he purposed to do

140 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him.
"What God is," he said, "I know not; what he
is not, I know." The Hindoos have denominated
the Supreme Being, the " Internal Check." The
illuminated Quakers explained their Light, not as
somewhat which leads to any action, but it ap-
pears as an obstruction to any thing unfit. But
the right examples are private experiences, which
are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly
speaking, Swedenborg's revelation is a confound-
ing of planes, — a capital offence in so learned
a categorist. This is to carry the law of surface
into the plane of substance, to carry individual-
ism and its fopperies into the realm of essences
and generals, which is dislocation and chaos.

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age.
No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an
early syllable to answer the longings of saints,
the fears of mortals. We should have listened
on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter
obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallel-
ism with the celestial currents, and could hint to
human ears the scenery and circumstance of the
newly parted soul. But it is certain that it must
tally with what is best in nature. It must not
be inferior in tone to the already known works
of the artist who sculptures the globes of the
firmament, and writes the moral law. It must

SWEDENBORG J OR, THE MYSTIC. 141

be fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains,
agreeing with flowers, with tides, and the rising
and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets
shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the
penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is
sounded, — the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat,
which makes the tune to which the sun rolls,
and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees.

In this mood, we hear the rumor that the seer
has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no
beauty, no heaven : for angels, goblins. The
sad muse loves night and death, and the pit.
His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world
bears the same relation to the generosities and
joys of truth, of which human souls have already
made us cognisant, as a man's bad dreams bear to
his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its end-
less power of lurid pictures, to the phenomena
of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest
gentleman, benevolent, but dyspeptic, into a
wretch, skulking like a dog about the outer yards
and kennels of creation. When he mounts into
the heaven, I do not hear its language. A man
should not tell me that he has walked among the
angels ; his proof is, that his eloquence makes
me one. Shall the archangels be less majestic
and sweet than the figures that have actually
walked the earth? These angels that Sweden-

142 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

borg paints give us no very high idea of their
discipline and culture : they are all country par-
sons : their heaven is a fete champetre, an evan-
gelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes
to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didac-
tic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes
of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and
visits doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or horn-
blende ! He has no sympathy. He goes up and
down the world of men, a modern Rhadaman-
thus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with
nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributes
souls. The warm, many-weathered, passionate-
peopled world is to him a grammar of hiero-
glyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession.
How different is Jacob Behmen ! he is tremulous
with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with the
gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons
he conveys ; and when he asserts that, " in some
sort, love is greater than God," his heart beats so
high that the thumping against his leathern coat
is audible across the centuries. 7 Tis a great
difference. Behmen is healthily and beautifully
wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness
and incommunicableness. Swedenborg is dis-
agreeably wise, and, with all his accumulated
gifts, paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature, that it

OR, THE MYSTIC. 143

opens a foreground, and, like the breath of morn-
ing landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg
is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his
mattock and shroud. Some minds are for ever
restrained from descending into nature ; others
are for ever prevented from ascending out of it.
With a force of many men, he could never break
the umbilical cord which held him to ^.nature, and
he did not rise to the platform of pure genius.

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his per-
ception of symbols, saw the poetic construction
of things, and the primary relation of mind to
matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole
apparatus of poetic expression, which that percep-
tion creates. He knew the grammar and rudiments
of the Mother-Tongue, — how could he not read off
one strain into music ? Was he like Saadi, who,
in his vision, designed to fill his lap with the ce-
lestial flowers, as presents for his friends ; but the
fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him, that the
skirt dropped from his hands ? or, is reporting a
breach of the manners of that heavenly society ?
or, was it that he saw the vision intellectually, and
hence that chiding of the intellectual that per-
vades his books ? Be it as it may, his books have
no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the
dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate
imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty.

144 REPRESENTATIVE MEN".

We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape.
No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead.
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent
a mind betokens the disease, and, like a hoarse
voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning.
I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer.
His great name will turn a sentence. His books
have become a monument. His laurel so largely
mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles
with the temple incense, that boys and maids will
shun the spot.

Yet, in this immolation of genius and fame at
the shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime beyond
praise. He lived to purpose : he gave a verdict.
He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul
must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many
opinions conflict as to the true centre. In the
shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some
to cask and barrel, some to spars, some to mast ;
the pilot chooses with science, — I plant myself
here ; all will sink before this ; " he comes to land
who sails with me." Do not rely on heavenly
favor, or on compassion to folly, or on prudence,
on common sense, the old usage and main chance
of men: nothing can keep you, — not fate, nor
health, nor admirable intellect ; none can keep you,
but rectitude only, rectitude for ever and ever ! —
and, with a tenacity that never swerved in all his

145

studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this
brave choice. I think of him as of some trans-
migrating votary of Indian legend, who says,
1 though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last
rudiments of nature, under what integument or
ferocity, I cleave to right, as the sure ladder that
leads up to man and to God.'

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to
mankind, which is now only beginning to be
known. By the science of experiment and use,
he made his first steps : he observed and published
the laws of nature ; and, ascending by just de-
grees, from events to their summits and causes, he
was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and
abandoned himself to his joy and worship. This
was his first service. If the glory was too bright
for his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the
trance of delight, the more excellent is the spec-
tacle he saw, the realities of being which beam
and blaze through him, and which no infirmities
of the prophet are suffered to obscure ; and he
renders a second passive service to men, not less
than the first, — perhaps, in the great circle of
being, and in the retributions of spiritual nature,
not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.
13

MONTAIGNE;

OE,

THE SKEPTIC-

IV.

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC

Every fact is related on one side to sensation,
and, on the other, to morals. The game of
thought is, on the appearance of one of these
two sides, to find the other ; given the upper, to
find the under side. Nothing so thin, but has
these two faces ; and, when the observer has seen
the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse.
Life is a pitching of this penny, — heads or tails.
We never tire of this game, because there is still
a slight shudder of astonishment at the exhibition
of the other face, at the contrast of the two faces.
A man is flushed with success, and bethinks hin>
self what this good luck signifies. He drives his
bargain in the street ; but it occurs, that he also
is bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a
human face, and searches the cause of that
beauty, which must be more beautiful. He
builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes
13*

150 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

his children ; but he asks himself, why ? and
whereto ? This head and this tail are called, in
the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite ;
Relative and Absolute ; Apparent and Real ; and
many fine names beside.

Each man is born with a predisposition to one
or the other of these sides of nature ; and, it will
easily happen that men will be found devoted to
one or the other. One class has the perception
of difference, and is conversant with facts and
surfaces ; cities and persons ; and the bringing
certain things to pass ; — the men of talent and
action. Another class have the perception of
identity, and are men of faith and philosophy,
men of genius.

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus
believes only in philosophers ; Fenelon, in saints ;
Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty
language in which Plato and the Platonists speak
of all men who are not devoted to their own
shining abstractions : other men are rats and
mice. The literary class is usually proud and
exclusive. The correspondence of Pope and
Swift describes mankind around them as mon-
sters ; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our
own time, is scarcely more kind.

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes.
The genius is a genius by the first look he casts

OR, THE SKEPTIC. 151

on any object. Is his eye creative ? Does he
not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the
design, — he will presently undervalue the actual
object. In powerful moments, his thought has
dissolved the works of art and nature into their
causes, so that the works appear heavy and
faulty. He has a conception of beauty which
| the sculptor cannot embody. Picture, statue,
/ temple, railroad, steam-engine, existed first in an
/ artist's mind, without flaw, mistake, or friction,
which impair the executed models. So did the
church, the state, college, court, social circle, and
all the institutions. It is not strange that these
men, remembering what they have seen and
hoped of ideas, should affirm disdainfully the
superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen
that the happy soul will carry all the arts in
power, they say, Why cumber ourselves with
superfluous realizations ? and, like dreaming beg-
gars, they assume to speak and act as if these
values were already substantiated.

On the other part, the men of toil and trade
and luxury, — the animal world, including the
animal in the philosopher and poet also, — and
the practical world, including the painful drudg-
eries which are never excused to philosopher or
poet any more than to the rest, — weigh heavily on
the other side. The trade in our streets believes

15% REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

in no metaphysical causes, thinks nothing of
the force which necessitated traders and a trading
planet to exist : no, but sticks to cotton, sugar,
wool, and salt. The ward meetings, on election
days, are not softened by any misgiving of the
value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming
in a single direction. To the men of this world, to
the animal strength and spirits, to the men of
practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man
of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone
have reason.

Things always bring their own philosophy
with them, that is, prudence. No man acquires
property without acquiring with it a little arith-
metic, also. In England, the richest country that
ever existed, property stands for more, compared
with personal ability, than in any other. After
dinner, a man believes less, denies more : verities
have lost some charm. After dinner, arithmetic
is the only science : ideas are disturbing, incendi-
ary, follies of young men, repudiated by the solid
portion of society : and a man comes to be val-
ued by his athletic and animal qualities. Spence
relates, that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey
Kneller, one day, when his nephew, a Guinea
trader, came in. " Nephew," said Sir Godfrey,
" you have the honor of seeing the two greatest
men in the world." "I don't know how great

MONTAIGNE J OR, THE SKEPTIC. 153

men you may be," said the Guinea man, "but I
don't like your looks. I have often bought a
man much better than both of you, all muscles
and bones, for ten guineas." Thus, the men of
the senses revenge themselves on the professors,
and repay scorn for scorn. The first had leaped
to conclusions not yet ripe, and say more than is
true ; the others make themselves merry with the
philosopher, and weigh man by the pound. — ■
They believe that mustard bites the tongue,
that pepper is hot, friction-matches are incendiary >
revolvers to be avoided, and suspenders hold up
pantaloons ; that there is much sentiment in a
chest of tea ; and a man will be eloquent, if you
give him good wine. Are you tender and scru-
pulous, — you must eat more mince-pie. They
hold that Luther had milk in him when he said,

""Wer nieht liebt "Wein, Wei^und Gesang,
Der bleibt ein. Narr sein Leben lang ; "

and when he advised a young scholar, perplexed
with fore-ordination and free-will, to get well
drunk. " The nerves," says Cabanis, " they are
the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the
tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of money
is sure and speedy spending. " For his part,"
he says, "he puts his down his neck, and gets
the good of it."

154 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is,
that it runs into indifferentism, and then into
disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall be
fables presently. Keep cool : it will be all one
a hundred years hence. Life's well enough ; but
we shall be glad to get out of it, and they will
all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and
drudge ? Our meat will taste to-morrow as it
did yesterday, and we may at last have had
enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentle-
man at Oxford, " there's nothing new or true, —
and no matter."

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans :
our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle
of hay being carried before him : he sees nothing
but the bundle of hay. " There is so much
trouble in coming into the world," said Lord
Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly
worth while to be here at all." I knew a phi-
losopher of this kidney, who was accustomed
briefly to sum up his experience of human nature
in saying, " Mankind is a damned rascal : " and
the natural corollary is pretty sure to follow, —
i The world lives by humbug, and so will I.'

The abstractionist and the materialist thus
mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer
expressing the worst of materialism, there arises

W5

a third party to occupy the middle ground be-
tween these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds
both wrong by being in extremes. He labors
to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.
He will not go beyond his card. He sees the
one-sidedness of these men of the street ; he will
not be a Gibeonite ; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to
keep it cool : no unadvised industry, no unre-
warded self-devotion, no loss of the brains in toil.
Am I an ox, or a dray ? — You are both in ex-
tremes, he says. You that will have all solid,
and a world of pig-lead, deceive yourselves gross-
ly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded
on adamant ,* and yet, if we uncover the last facts
of our knowledge, you are spinning like bubbles
in a river, you know not whither or whence, and
you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in
delusions.

Neither will he be betrayed to a book, andTN
wrapped in a gown. The studious class are their
own victims : they are thin and pale, their feet
are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without
sleep, the day a fear of interruption, — pallor,
squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near
them, and see what conceits they entertain, —
they are abstractionists, and spend their days and
nights in dreaming some dream ; in expecting the

156 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

homage of society to some precious scheme built
on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its pre-
sentment, of justness in its application, and of all
energy of will in the schemer to embody and
vitalize it.

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I
know that human strength is not in extremes, but
in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the
weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth.
What is the use of pretending to powers we have
not ? What is the use of pretending to assurances
we have not, respecting the other life ? Why ex-
aggerate the power of virtue ? Why be an angel
before your time ? These strings, wound up too
high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortal-
ity, and no evidence, why not say just that ? If
there are conflicting evidences, why not state
them ? If there is not ground for a candid thinker
to make up his mind, yea or nay, — why not sus-
pend the judgment ? I weary of these dogma-
tizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny
the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand
here to try the case. I am here to consider,
Cxstttsjv, to consider how it is. I will try to
keep the balance true. Of what use to take the
chair, and glibly rattle off theories of society,
religion, and nature, when I know that practical
objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me

montaigne; or, the skeptic. 157

and by my mates ? Why so talkative in public,
when each of my neighbors can pin me to my
seat by arguments I cannot refute ? Why pretend
that life is so simple a game, when we know how
subtle and elusive the Proteus is ? Why think to
shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we
know there are not one or two only, but ten,
twenty, a thousand things, and unlike ? Why
fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping ?
There is much to say on all sides.

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that
there is no practical question on which any thing
more than an approximate solution can be had ?
Is not marriage an open question, when it is
alleged, from the beginning of the world, that
such as are in the institution wish to get out, and
such as are out wish to get in ? And the reply of
Socrates, to him who asked whether he should
choose a wife, still remains reasonable, "that,
whether he should choose one or not, he would
repent it." Is not the state a question? All so-
ciety is divided in opinion on the subject of the
state. Nobody loves it ; great numbers dislike it,
and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance :
and the only defence set up, is, the fear of doing
worse in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the
church? Or, to put any of the questions which
touch mankind nearest, — shall the young man aim
14

158 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

at a leading part in law, in politics, in trade ? It
will not be pretended that a success in either of
these kinds is quite coincident with what is best
and inmost in his mind. Shall he, then, cutting
the stays that hold him fast to the social state,
put out to sea with no guidance but his genius ?
There is much to say on both sides. Remember
the open question between the present order of
" competition," and the friends of "attractive and
associated labor." The generous minds embrace
the proposition of labor shared by all ; it is the
only honesty ; nothing else is safe. It is from the
poor man's hut alone, that strength and virtue
come : and yet, on the other side, it is alleged that
labor impairs the form, and breaks the spirit of
man, and the laborers cry unanimously, ' We have
no thoughts.' Culture, how indispensable ! I
cannot forgive you the want of accomplishments ;
and yet, culture will instantly destroy that chiefest
beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture
for a savage ; but once let him read in the book,
and he is no longer able not to think of Plutarch's
heroes. In short, since true fortitude of under-
standing consists " in not letting what we know
be embarrassed by what we do not know," we
ought to secure those advantages which we can
command, and not risk them by clutching after
the airy and unattainable. Come, no chimeras !

MONTAIGNE J OR, THE SKEPTIC. 159

Let us go abroad ; let us mix in affairs ; let us
learn, and get, and have, and climb. " Men are a
sort of moving plants, and, like trees, receive a
great part of their nourishment from the air. If
they keep too much at home, they pine." Let
us have a robust, manly life ; let us know what
we know, for certain ; what we have, let it be
solid, and seasonable, and our own. A world in
the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have
to do with real men and women, and not with
skipping ghosts.

This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic, —
this of consideration, of self-containing ; not at all
of unbelief; not at all of universal denying, nor
of universal doubting, — doubting even that he
doubts ; least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeer-
ing at all that is stable and good. These are no
more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent,
taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his
means, believing that a man has too many en-
emies, than that he can afford to be his own ;
that we can not give ourselves too many advan-
tages, in this unequal conflict, with powers so
vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and
this little, conceited, vulnerable popinjay that a
man is, bobbing up and down into every danger,
on the other. It is a position taken up for better

160 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

defence, as of more safety, and one that can be
maintained ; and it is one of more opportunity
and range : as, when we build a house, the rule
is, to set it not too high nor too low, under the
wind, but out of the dirt.

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions
and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes
are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory
of Saint John, and of nonresistance, seems, on
the other hand, too thin and aerial. We want
some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the
first, and limber as the second. We want a ship
in these billows we inhabit. An angular, dog-
matic house would be rent to chips and splinters,
in this storm of many elements. No, it must be
tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all ;
as a shell is the architecture of a house founded
on the sea. The soul of man must be the type
of our scheme, just as the body of man is the
type after which a dwelling-house is built.
Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature.
We are golden averages, volitant stabilities, com-
pensated or periodic errors, houses founded on
the sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a
near view of the best game, and the chief play-
ers ; what is best in the planet ; art and nature,
places and events, but mainly men. Every thing
that is excellent in mankind, — a form of grace, an

MONTAIGNE ] OR, THE SKEPTIC. 161

arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain of re-
sources, every one skilful to play and win, — he
will see and judge.

The terms of admission to this spectacle, are,
that he have a certain solid and intelligible way
of living of his own ; some method of answering
the inevitable needs of human life ; proof that
he has played with skill and success ; that he
has evinced the temper, stoutness, and the range
of qualities which, among his contemporaries and
countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust.
For, the secrets of life are not shown except to
sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide
themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but
to their peers. Some wise limitation, as the
modern phrase is ; some condition between the
extremes, and having itself a positive quality ;
some stark and sufficient man, who is not salt or
sugar, but sufficiently related to the world to do
justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time,
a vigorous and original thinker, whom cities can
not overawe, but who uses them, — is the fit
person to occupy this ground of speculation.

These qualities meet in the character of Mon-
taigne. And yet, since the personal regard which
I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great,
1 will, under the shield of this prince of egotists,
offer, as an apology for electing him as the repre-
14*

162 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

sentative of skepticism, a word or two to explain
how my love began and grew for this admirable
gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of
the Essays remained to me from my father's
library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from
college, I read the book, and procured the remain-
ing volumes. I remember the delight and won-
der in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as
if I had myself written the book, in some former
life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and ex-
perience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833,
that, in the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to
a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830,
aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monu-
ment, " lived to do right, and had formed himself
to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne." Some
years later, I became acquainted with an accom-
plished English poet, John Sterling ; and, in prose-
cuting my correspondence, I found that, from a
love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to
his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Peri-
gord, and, after two hundred and fifty years, had
copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions
which Montaigne had written there. That Jour-
nal of Mr. Sterling's, published in the West-
minster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the

; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 163

Prolegomena to his edition of the Essays. I
heard with pleasure that one of the newly-discov-
ered autographs of William Shakspeare was in a
copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have
been in the poet's library. And, oddly enough, the
duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Muse-
um purchased, with a view of protecting the
Shakspeare autograph, (as I was informed in the
Museum,) turned out to have the autograph of
Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hmit relates
of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was the only great
writer of past times whom he read with avowed
satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to
be mentioned here, concurred to make this old
Gascon still new and immortal for me.

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne,
then thirty-eight years old, retired from the prac-
tice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his
estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure,
and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now
grew on him, and he loved the compass, staidness,
and independence, of the country gentleman's
life. He took up his economy in good earnest,
and made his farms yield the most. Downright
and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or
lo deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his
sense and probity. In the civil wars of the

164 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

League, which converted every house into a fort,
Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house
without defence. All parties freely came and
went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry
brought jewels and papers to him for safe-keep-
ing. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France, — Henry IV".
and Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all
writers. His French freedom runs into grossness ;
but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty
of his own confessions. In his times, books
were written to one sex only, and almost all
were written in Latin ; so that, in a humorist, a
certain nakedness of statement was permitted,
which our manners, of a literature addressed
equally to both sexes, do not allow. But, though
a biblical plainness, coupled with a most un-
canonical levity, may shut his pages to many
sensitive readers, yet the offence is superficial.
He parades it : he makes the most of it : nobody
can think or say worse of him than he does. He
pretends to most of the vices ; and, if there be
any virtue in him, he says, it got in by stealth.
There is no man, in his opinion, who has not
deserved hanging five or six times ; and he pre-
tends no exception in his own behalf. " Five or

MONTAIGNE ; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 165

six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, " can be
told of me, as of any man living." But, with
all this really superfluous frankness, the opinion
of an invincible probity grows into every reader's
mind.

" When I the most strictly and religiously
confess myself, I find that the best virtue I have
has in it some tincture of vice ; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue, (I, who am as
sincere and perfect a lover of virtue of that stamp
as any other whatever,) if he had listened, and
laid his ear close to himself, would have heard
some jarring sound of human mixture ; but faint
and remote, and only to be perceived by him-
self."

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at
color or pretence of any kind. He has been in
courts so long as to have conceived a furious dis-
gust at appearances ; he will indulge himself with
a little cursing and swearing ; he will talk with
sailors and gipsies, use flash and street ballads :
he has stayed in-doors till he is deadly sick ; he
will to the open air, though it rain bullets. He
has seen too much of gentlemen of the long
robe, until he wishes for cannibals ; and is so
nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the
more barbarous man is, the better he is. He
likes his saddle. You may read theology, and

166 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever
you get here, shall smack of the earth and of
real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes
no hesitation to entertain you with the records
of his disease ; and his journey to Italy is quite
full of that matter. He took and kept this
position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew
an emblematic pair of scales, and wrote Que sgais
je ? under it. As I look at his effigy opposite
the title-page, I seem to hear him say, ' You may
play old Poz, if you will ; you may rail and exag-
gerate, — I stand here for truth, and will not, for
all the states, and churches, and revenues, and
personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry
fact, as I see it ; I will rather mumble and prose
about what I certainly know, — my house and
barns ; my father, my wife, and my tenants ; my
old lean bald pate ; my knives and forks ; what
meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer; and a
hundred straws just as ridiculous, — than I will
write, with a fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I
like gray days, and autumn and winter weather.
I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an
undress, and old shoes that do not pinch my feet,
and old friends who do not constrain me, and
plain topics where I do not need to strain myself
and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our
condition as men is risky and ticklish enough.

MONTAIGNE J OR, THE SKEPTIC. 167

One can not be sure of himself and his fortune
an hour, but he may be whisked off into some
pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I
vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballast-
ing, the best I can, this dancing balloon ? So, at
least, I live within compass, keep myself ready
for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last, with
decency. If there be any thing farcical in such
a life, the blame is not mine : let it lie at fate's
and nature's door.'

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining
soliloquy on every random topic that comes into
his head • treating every thing without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men
with deeper insight ; but, one would say, never
a man with such abundance of thoughts : he is
never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to
make the reader care for all that he cares for.

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches
to his sentences. I know not any where the
book that seems less written. It is the language
of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these
words, and they would bleed ; they are vascular
and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that
we have in listening to the necessary speech of
men about their work, when any unusual cir-
cumstance gives momentary importance to the
dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not

168 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

trip in their speech ; it is a shower of bullets. It
is Cambridge men who correct themselves, and
begin again at every half sentence, and, more-
over, will pun, and refine too much, and swerve
from the matter to the expression. Montaigne
talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and
books, and himself, and uses the positive degree :
never shrieks, or protests, or prays : no weakness,
no convulsion, no superlative : does not wish to
jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or anni-
hilate space or time ; but is stout and solid ; tastes
every moment of the day ; likes pain, because it
makes him feel himself, and realize things ; as we
pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He
keeps the plain ; he rarely mounts or sinks ; likes
to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath.
His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration ;
contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle
of the road. There is but one exception, — in
his love for Socrates. In speaking of him, for
once his cheek flushes, and his style rises to
passion.

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of
sixty, in 1592. When he came to die, he caused
the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At
the age of thirty-three, he had been married.
" But," he says, " might I have had my own
will, I would, not have married Wisdom herself,

MONTAIGNE ] OR, THE SKEPTIC. 169

if she would have had me : but 'tis to much
purpose to evade it, the common custom and use
of life will have it so. Most of my actions are
guided by example, not choice." In the hour
of death, he gave the same weight to custom.
Que sgais je ? What do I know ?

This book of Montaigne the world has en-
dorsed, by translating it into all tongues, and
printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe :
and that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen,
namely, among courtiers, soldiers, princes, men
of the world, and men of wit and generosity.

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wise-
ly, and given the right and permanent expression
of the human mind, on the conduct of life ?

We are natural believers. Truth, or the con-
nection between cause and effect, alone interests
us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through
all things : all worlds are strung on it, as beads :
and men, and events, and life, come to us, only
because of that thread : they pass and repass,
only that Ave may know the direction and con-
tinuity of that line. A book or statement which
goes to show that there is no line, but random
and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a pros-
perity and no account of it, a hero born from a
15

170 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

fool, a fool from a hero, — dispirits us. Seen or
unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes
counterfeit ties ; genius finds the real ones. We
hearken to the man of science, because we anti-
cipate the sequence in natural phenomena which
he uncovers. We Love whatever affirms, con-
nects, preserves ; and dislike what scatters or pulls
down. One man appears whose nature is to all
men's eyes conserving and constructive : his
presence supposes a well-ordered society, agricul-
ture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If
these did not exist, they would begin to exist
through his endeavors. Therefore, he cheers and
comforts men, who feel all this in him very
readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say
all manner of unanswerable things against the
existing republic, but discover to our sense no
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore,
though the town, and state, and way of living,
which our counsellor contemplated, might be a
very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly
go for him, and reject the reformer, so long as
he comes only with axe and crowbar.

But though we are natural conservers and caus-
ationists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the
skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have
reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to
it. Every superior mind will pass through this

MONTAIGNE J OR, THE SKEPTIC. 171

domain of equilibration, — I should rather say,
will know how to avail himself of the checks
and balances in nature, as a natural weapon
against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots
and blockheads.

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the
student in relation to the particulars which so-
ciety adores, but which he sees to be reverend
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground
occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the
temple. Society does not like to have any
breath of question blown on the existing order.
But the interrogation of custom at all points is an
inevitable stage in the growth of every superior
mind, and is the evidence of its perception of
the flowing power which remains itself in all
changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at
odds with the evils of society, and with the
projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen : no conservative ;
he sees the selfishness of property, and the drowsi-
ness of institutions. But neither is he fit to work
with any democratic party that ever was con-
stituted ; for parties wish everyone committed,
and he penetrates the popular patriotism. His
politics are those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir
Walter Raleigh ; or of Krishna, in the Bha-

172 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

gavat, " There is none who is worthy of my
love or hatred ; " whilst he sentences law, physic,
divinity, commerce, and custom. He is a re-
former : yet he is no better member of the phi-
lanthropic association. It turns out that he is
not the champion of the operative, the pauper,
the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind,
that our life in this world is not of quite so
easy interpretation as churches and school-books
say. He does not wish to take ground against
these benevolences, to play the part of devil's
attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that
darkens the sun for him. But he says, There
are doubts.

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the
calendar-day of our Saint Michel de Montaigne,
by counting and describing these doubts or ne-
gations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes,
and sun them a little. We must do with them as
the police do with old rogues, who are shown up
to the public at the marshal's office. They will
never be so formidable, when once they have
been identified and registered. But I mean hon-
estly by them, — that justice shall be done to their
terrors. I shall not take Sunday objections, made
up on purpose to be put down. I shall take the
worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them,
or they of me.

MONTAIGNE J OR, THE SKEPTIC. 173

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist.
I know, the quadruped opinion will not prevail.
5 Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think.
The first dangerous symptom I report, is, the levity
of intellect ; as if it were fatal to earnestness to
know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we
can not know. The dull pray ; the geniuses are
light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on
every platform ! but intellect kills it. Nay, San
Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct as-
cension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly
insight, and sends back the votary orphaned. My
astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and
saints infected. They found the ark empty ; saw,
and would not tell ; and tried to choke off their
approaching followers, by saying, ' Action, action,
my dear fellows, is for you ! ' Bad as was to
me this detection by San Carlo, this frost in July,
this blow from a bride, there was still a worse,
namely, the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the
mount of vision, ere they have yet risen from their
knees, they say, ' We discover that this our homage
and beatitude is partial and deformed : we must
fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect,
to the Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the
gymnastics of talent.'

This is hobgoblin the first ; and, though it
15*

174 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

has been the subject of much elegy, in our
nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and
other poets of less fame, not to mention many
distinguished private observers, — I confess it is
not very aifecting to my imagination ; for it seems
to concern the shattering of baby-houses and
crockery-shops. What nutters the church of
Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of Boston,
may yet be very far from touching any principle
of faith. I think that the intellect and moral
sentiment are unanimous ; and that, though
philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the
natural checks of vice, and polarity to the soul.
I think that the wiser a man is, the more stupen-
dous he finds the natural and moral economy,
and lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.

There is the power of moods, each setting at
nought all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs.
There is the power of complexions, obviously
modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The
beliefs and unbeliefs appear to be structural ; and,
as soon as each man attains the poise and vivacity
which allow the whole machinery to play, he
will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly
alternate all opinions in his own life. Our life is
March weather, savage and serene in one hour.
We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in
the iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on

MONTAIGNE ] OR, THE SKEPTIC. 175

our heel to save our life : but a book, or a bust,
or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark
through the nerves, and we suddenly believe in
will : my finger-ring shall be the seal of Sol-
omon : fate is for imbeciles : all is possible to
the resolved mind. Presently, a new experience
gives a new turn to our thoughts : common
sense resumes its tyranny : we say, ' Well, the
army, after all, is the gate to fame, manners, and
poetry : and, look you, — on the whole, selfishness
plants best, prunes best, makes the best com-
merce, and the best citizen.' Are the opinions
of a man on right and wrong, on fate and causa-
tion, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indiges-
tion ? Is his belief in God and Duty no deeper
than a stomach evidence ? And what guaranty
for the permanence of his opinions ? I like not
the French celerity, — a new ehurch and state
once a week. — This is the second negation ; and
I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it
asserts rotation of states of mind, I suppose it
suggests its own remedy, namely, in the record
of larger periods. What is the mean of many
states ; of all the states ? Does the general voice
of ages affirm any principle, or is no community
of sentiment discoverable in distant times and
places ? And when it shows the power of self-
interest, I accept that as part of the divine law,

176 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

and must reconcile it with aspiration the best I
can.

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the
sense of mankind, in all ages, — that the laws of
the world do not always befriend, but often hurt
and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or
nature, grows over us like grass. We paint Time
with a scythe ; Love and Fortune, blind ; and
Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of
resistance against this ferocity which champs us
up. What front can we make against these
unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces ? What
can I do against the influence of Race, in my
history ? What can I do against hereditary and
constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, im-
potence ? against climate, against barbarism, in
my country ? I can reason down or deny every
thing, except this perpetual Belly : feed he must
and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

But the main resistance which the affirmative
impulse finds, and one including all others, is in
the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a pain-
ful rumor in circulation, that we have been
practised upon in all the principal performances
of life, and free agency is the emptiest name.
We have been sopped and drugged with the air,
with food, with woman, with children, with

MONTAIGNE ] OR, THE SKEPTIC. 177

sciences, with events, which leave us exactly
where they found us. The mathematics, 'tis
complained, leave the mind where they find it :
so do all sciences ; and so do all events and actions.
I find a man who has passed through all the
sciences, the churl he was ; and, through all the
offices, learned, civil, and social, can detect
the child. We are not the less necessitated to
dedicate life to them. In fact, we may come to
accept it as the fixed rule and theory of our state
of education, that God is a substance, and his
method is illusion. The eastern sages owned
the goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory energy
of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the
whole world is beguiled.

Or, shall I state it thus ? — The astonishment
of life, is, the absence of any appearance of re-
conciliation between the theory and practice of
life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is ap-
prehended, now and then, for a serene and pro-
found moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and
works which have no direct bearing on it ; — is
then lost, for months or years, and again found,
for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute
it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a
dozen reasonable hours. But what are these
cares and works the better ? A method in the
world we do not see, but this parallelism of great

178 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

and little, which never react on each other, nor
discover the smallest tendency to converge. Ex-
periences, fortunes, govemings, readings, writings,
are nothing to the purpose ; as when a man comes
into the room, it does not appear whether he has
been fed on yams or buffalo, — he has contrived
to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out
of rice or out of snow. So vast is the dispropor-
tion between the sky of law and the pismire of
performance under it, that, whether he is a man
of worth or a sot, is not so great a matter as we
say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this enchant-
ment, the stunning non-intercourse law which
makes cooperation impossible ? The young spirit
pants to enter society. But all the ways of cul-
ture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment.
He has been often baulked. He did not expect a
sympathy with his thought from the village, but
he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and
found no entertainment for it, but mere misappre-
hension, distaste, and scoffing. Men are strangely
mistimed and misapplied ; and the excellence of
each is an inflamed individualism which separates
him more.

There are these, and more than these diseases
of thought, which our ordinary teachers do not
attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a good
nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, There are

MONTAIGNE J OR, THE SKEPTIC. 179

no doubts, — and lie for the right ? Is life to be
led in a brave or in a cowardly manner ? and is
not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to ail
manliness ? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier
to that which is virtue ? Can you not believe
that a man of earnest and burly habit may find
small good in tea, essays, and catechism, and want
a rougher instruction, want men, labor, trade,
farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt,
and terror, to make things plain to him ; and has
he not a right to insist on being convinced in his
own way? When he is convinced, he will be
worth the pains.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of
the soul ; unbelief, in denying them. Some
minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts
they profess to entertain are rather a civility or
accommodation to the common discourse of their
company. They may well give themselves leave
to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once
admitted to the heaven of thought, they see no
relapse into night, but infinite invitation on the
other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky
over sky, and they are encompassed with divini-
ties. Others there are, to whom the heaven is
brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the
earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more
or less immersion in nature. The last class must

180 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

needs have a reflex or parasite faith ; not a sight
of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers
and believers of realities. The manners and
thoughts of believers astonish them, and convince
them that these have seen something which is hid
from themselves. But their sensual habit would
fix the believer to his last position, whilst he as
inevitably advances ; and presently the unbeliever,
for love of belief, burns the believer.

Great believers are always reckoned infidels,
impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men
of no account. The spiritualist finds himself
driven to express his faith by a series of skepti-
cisms. Charitable souls come with their projects,
and ask his cooperation. How can he hesitate ?
It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to
agree where you can, and to turn your sentence
with something auspicious^. and not freezing and
sinister. But he is forced to say, ' O, these things
will be as they must be : what can you do ?
These particular griefs and crimes are the foliage
and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is
vain to complain of the leaf or the berry : cut it
off ; it will bear another just as bad. You must
begin your cure lower down.' The generosities
of the day prove an intractable element for him.
The people's questions are not his ; their methods
are not his ; and, against all the dictates of good

MONTAIGNE } OR, THE SKEPTIC, 181

nature, he is driven to say, he has no pleasure in
them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man,
of the divine Providence, and of the immortality
of the soul, his neighbors can not put the statement
so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of
more faith, and not less. He denies out of hon-
esty. He had rather stand charged with the im-
becility of skepticism, than with untruth. I
believe, he says, in the moral design of the uni-
verse ; it exists hospitably for the weal of souls ;
but your dogmas seem to me caricatures : why
should I make believe them ? Will any say, this
is cold and infidel ? The wise and magnanimous
will not say so. They will exult in his far-sighted
good-will, that can abandon to the adversary all
the ground of traditiornand common belief, with-
out losing a jot of length. It sees to the end
of all transgression. George Fox saw - that there
was an ocean of darkness and death ; but withal,
an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed
over that of darkness."

The final solution in which skepticism is lost,
is, in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits
its supremacy. All moods may be safely tried,
and their weight allowed to all objections : the
moral sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as
any one. This is the drop which balances the
16

182 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and
take those superficial views which we call skep-
ticism ; but I know that they will presently
appear to me in that order which makes skep-
ticism impossible. A man of thought must feel
the thought that is parent of the universe : that
the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

This faith avails to the whole emergency of
life and objects. The world is saturated with
deity and with law. He is content with just
and unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph
of folly and fraud. He can behold with serenity
the yawning gulf between the ambition of man
and his power of performance, between the
demand and supply of power, which makes the
tragedy of all souls.

Charles Fourier announced that "the attractions
of man are proportioned to his destinies ; " in
other words, that every desire predicts its own
satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits the
reverse of this ; the incompetency of power is
the universal grief of young and ardent minds.
They accuse the divine providence of a certain
parsimony. It has shown the heaven and earth
to every child, and filled him with a desire for
the whole ; a desire raging, infinite ; a hunger, as
of space to be filled with planets ; a cry of
famine, as of devils for souls. Then for the

MONTAIGNE ) OR, THE SKEPTIC. 183

satisfaction, — to each man is administered a
single drop, a bead of dew of vital power, per
day, — a cup as large as space, and one drop of
the water of life in it. Each man woke in the
morning, with an appetite that could eat the solar
system like a cake ; a spirit for action and passion
without bounds ; he could lay his hand on the
morning star : he could try conclusions with grav-
itation or chemistry ; but, on the first motion to
prove his strength, — hands, feet, senses, gave way,
and would not serve him. He was an emperor
deserted by his states, and left to whistle by him-
self, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whist-
ling : and still the sirens sang, " The attractions
are proportioned to the destinies." In every
house, in the heart of each maiden, and of each
boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm
is found, — between the largest promise of ideal
power, and the shabby experience.

The expansive nature of truth comes to our
succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man
helps himself by larger generalizations. The
lesson of life is practically to generalize : to
believe what the years and the centuries say
against the hours ; to resist the usurpation of
particulars ; to penetrate to their catholic sense.
Things seem to say one thing, and say the re-
% r erse. The appearance is immoral ; the result is

184 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justi-
fy despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the
just ; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, the just
cause is carried forward. Although knaves win
in every political struggle, although society seems
to be delivered over from the hands of one set
of criminals into the hands of another set of
criminals, as fast as the government is changed,
and the march of civilization is a train of felo-
nies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.
We see, now, events forced on, which seem to
retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the
world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and
waves can not drown him. He snaps his finger
at laws : and so, throughout history, heaven seems
to affect low and poor means. Through the
years and the centuries, through evil agents,
through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent
tendency irresistibly streams.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in
the mutable and fleeting ; let him learn to bear
the disappearance of things he was wont to
reverence, without losing his reverence ; let him
learn that he is here, not to work, but to be
worked upon ; and that, though abyss open under
abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last
contained in the Eternal Cause. —

" If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea."

SHAKSPEARE

OR,

THE POET.

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET

Great men are more distinguished by range and
extent, than by originality. If we require the
originality which consists in weaving, like a
spider, their web from their own bowels ; in finding
clay, and making bricks, and building the house ;
no great men are original. Nor does valuable
originality consist in unlikeness to other men.
The hero is in the press of knights, and the thick
of events ; and, seeing what men want, and sharing
their desire, he adds the needful length of sight
and of arm, to come at the desired point. The
greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet
is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost,
and, because he says every thing, saying, at last,
something good ; but a heart in unison with his
time and country. There is nothing whimsical
and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions,

188 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

and pointed with the most determined aim which
any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals,
and will not have any individual great, except
through the general. There is no choice to
genius. A great man does not wake up on some
fine morning, and say, 1 1 am full of life, I will go
to sea, and find an Antarctic continent : to-day I
will square the circle : I will ransack botany, and
find a new food for man : I have a new architect-
ure in my mind : I foresee a new mechanic
power : ' no, but he finds himself in the river of
the thoughts and events, forced onward by the
ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He
stands where all the eyes of men look one way,
and their hands all point in the direction in which
he should go. The church has reared him amidst
rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice
which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral
needed by her chants and processions. He finds
a war raging : it educates him, by trumpet, in
barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds
two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or
fish, from the place of production to the place of
consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every
master has found his materials collected, and his
power lay in his sympathy with his people, and
in his love of the materials he wrought in. What

THE POET. 189

an economy of power ! and what a compensation
for the shortness of life ! All is done to his hand.
The world has brought him thus far on his way.
The human race has gone out before him, sunk
the hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the riv-
ers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all
have worked for him, and he enters into their
labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line
of tendency, out of the national feeling and his-
tory, and he would have all to do for himself : his
powers would be expended in the first preparations.
Great genial power, one would almost say, con-
sists in not being original at all ; in being altogether
receptive ; in letting the world do all. and suffer-
ing the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed
through the mind.

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the
English people were importunate for dramatic
entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions, and attempted to suppress
them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic
party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people
wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs,
and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,
were the ready theatres of strolling players.
The people had tasted this new joy ; and, as we
could not hope to suppress newspapers now, — no,

190 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

not by the strongest party, — neither then could
king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress
an organ, which was ballad, epic, newspaper,
caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same
time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all
found their own account in it. It had become,
by all causes, a national interest, — by no means
conspicuous, so that some great scholar would
have thought of treating it in an English history,
— but not a whit less considerable, because it was
cheap, and of no account, like a baker's-shop.
The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers
which suddenly broke into this field : Kyd, Mar-
low, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster,
Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger,
Beaumont, and Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the
public mind, is of the first importance to the poet
who works for it. He loses no time in idle
experiments. Here is audience and expectation
prepared. In the case of Shakspeare there is
much more. At the time when he left Stratford,
and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays,
of all dates and writers, existed in manuscript,
and were in turn produced on the boards. Here
is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will
bear hearing some part of every week ; the Death
of Julius Caesar, and other stories out of Plutarch,

SHAKSPEARE J OR, THE POET. 191

which they never tire of; a shelf full of English
history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur,
down to the royal Henries, which men hear
eagerly ; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry
Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the
London prentices know. All the mass has been
treated, with more or less skill, by every play-
wright, and the prompter has the soiled and
tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer pos-
sible to say who wrote them first. They have
been the property of the Theatre so long, and so
many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered
them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or
adding a song, that no man can any longer claim
copyright on this work of numbers. Happily, no
man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that
way. We have few readers, many spectators
and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
Shakspeare, in common with his comrades,
esteemed the mass of old plays, waste stock, in
which any experiment could be freely tried. Had
the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy
existed, nothing could have been done. The
rude warm blood of the living England circulated
in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body
which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy.
The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on
which he may work, and which, again, may

192 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

restrain his art within the due temperance, It
holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for
his edifice ; and, in furnishing so much work done
to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full
strength for the audacities of his imagination.
In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculp-
ture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt,
and in Greece, grew up in subordination to
architecture. It was the ornament of the temple
wall : at first, a rude relief carved on pediments,
then the relief became bolder, and a head or
arm was projected from the wall, the groups
being still arrayed with reference to the building,
which serves also as a frame to hold the figures ;
and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style
and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius
of architecture still enforced a certain ca'xnness
and continence in the statue. As soon as the
statue was begun for itself, and with no reference
to the temple or palace, the art began to decline :
freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place
of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
which the sculptor found in architecture, the
perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the
accumulated dramatic materials to which the peo-
ple were already wonted, and which had a certain
excellence which no single genius, however
extraordinary, could hope to create.

SHAKSPEARE J OR, THE POET. 193

In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did
owe debts in all directions, and was able to use
whatever he found ; and the amount of indebted-
ness may be inferred from Malone's laborious com-
putations in regard to the First, Second, and Third
parts of Henry VI., in which, " out of 6043 lines,
1771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare ; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid
by his predecessors ; and 1899 were entirely his
own." And the proceeding investigation hardly
leaves a single drama of his absolute invention.
Malone's sentence is an important piece of ex-
ternal history. In Henry VIII., I think I see
plainly the cropping out of the original rock on
which his own finer stratum was laid. The first
play was written by a superior, thoughtful man,
with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and
know well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy,
and the following scene with Cromwell, where, — ■
instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret
is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that
reading for the sense will best bring out the
rhythm, — here the lines are constructed on a
given tune, and the verse has even a trace of
pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through
all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's
hand, and some passages, as the account of the
coronation, are like autographs. What is odd,
17

194 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

the compliment to Q,ueen Elizabeth is in the bad
rhythm.

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a bet-
ter fable than any invention can. If he lost any
credit of design, he augmented his resources • and,
at that day, our petulant demand for originality
was not so much pressed. There was no literature
for the million. The universal reading, the cheap
press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears
in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the
light which is any where radiating. Every
intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it
is his fine office to bring to his people ; and he
comes to value his memory equally with his
invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence
his thoughts have been derived ; whether through
translation, whether through tradition, whether
by travel in distant countries, whether by inspira-
tion ; from whatever source, they are equally
welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he
borrows very near home. Other men say wise
things as well as he ; only they say a good many
foolish things, and do not know when they have
spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the
true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever
he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer,
perhaps ; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that
all wit was their wit. And they are librarians

SHAKSPEARE J OR, THE POET. 195

and historiographers, as well as poets. Each
romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hun-
dred tales of the world, —

" Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine."

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all
our early literature ; and, more recently, not only
Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him,
but, in the whole society of English writers, a
large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One
is charmed with the opulence which feeds so
many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge bor-
rower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually,
through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di
Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan
war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phry-
gius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccac-
cio, and the Provencal poets, are his benefactors :
the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious trans-
lation from William of Lorris and John of Meun :
Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino:
The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie :
The House of Fame, from the French or Italian :
and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a
brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build
his house. He steals by this apology, — that what

196 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be
practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man,
having once shown himself capable of original
writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the
writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
property of him who can entertain it ; and of
him who can adequately place it. A certain
awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts ;
but, as soon as we have learned what to do with
them, they become our own.

Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker
is retrospective. The learned member of the
legislature, at Westminster, or at Washington,
speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the
constituency, and the now invisible channels by
which the senator is made aware of their wishes,
the crowd of practical and knowing men, who,
by correspondence or conversation, are feeding
him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and
it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of
something of their impressiveness. As Sir Rob-
ert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and
Rousseau think for thousands ; and so there
were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi,
or Milton, from which they drew ; friends, lovers,
books, traditions, proverbs, — all perished, —
which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder.

SHAKSPEARE J OR, THE POET. 197

Did the bard speak with authority? Did he
feel himself overmatched by any companion?
The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer.
Is there at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to
ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it
be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer,
and to rely on that ? All the debts which such
a man could contract to other wit, would never
disturb his consciousness of originality : for the
ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a
whiff of smoke to that most private reality with
which he has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or
done by genius, in the world, was no man's work,
but came by wide social labor, when a thousand
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.
Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the
strength and music of the English language. But
it was not made by one man, or at one time ; but
centuries and churches brought it to perfection.
There never was a time when there was not some
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its
energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety
of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers
and forms of the Catholic church, — these col-
lected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and
meditations of every saint and sacred writer, all
17*

198 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

over the world. Grotius makes the like remark
in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single
clauses of which it is composed were already in
use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms.
He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous
language of the Common Law, the impressive
forms of our courts, and the precision and substan-
tial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribu-
tion of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men
who have lived in the countries where these laws
govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its ex-
cellence by being translation on translation. There
never was a time when there was none. All the
truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and
all others successively picked out, and thrown
away. Something like the same process had gone
on, long before, with the originals of these books.
The world takes liberties with world-books. Ve-
das, iEsop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid,
Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not
the work of single men. In the composition
of such works, the time thinks, the market
thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant,
the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book
supplies its time with one good word ; every
municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day,
and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid
or ashamed to owe his originality to the original-

OR, THE POET. 199

ity of all, stands with the next age as the recorder
and embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries,
and the Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the
steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries
celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the
final detachment from the church, and the com-
pletion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex,
and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the pos-
session of the stage by the very pieces which
Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and finally made
his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the
growing interest of the problem, they have left
no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret un-
opened, no file of old yellow accounts to decom-
pose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or
not, whether he held horses at the theatre door,
whether he kept school, and why he left in his
will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway,
his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness
with which the passing age mischooses the object
on which all candles shine, and all eyes are turned ;
the care with which it registers every trifle touch-
ing Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and the
Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams ;
and lets pass without a single valuable note the

200 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause
the Tudor dynasty to be remembered, — the man
who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspira-
tion which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the
foremost people of the world are now for some
ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this
and not another bias. A popular player, — nobody
suspected he was the poet of the human race ;
and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets
and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivo-
lous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of
the human understanding for his times, never
mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we
have strained his few words of regard and pane-
gyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose
first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt
thought the praise he has conceded to him gen-
erous, and esteemed himself, out of all question,
the better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the
proverb, Shakspeare's time should be capable of
recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four
years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three
years after him ; and I find, among his correspond-
ents and acquaintances, the following persons :
Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sid-
ney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter
Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac

OR, THE POET. 201

Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellar-
mine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales,
Kepler, Yieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,
Arminius ; with all of whom exists some token
of his having communicated, without enumerating
many others, whom doubtless he saw, — Shak-
speare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger,
two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman, and the rest.
Since the constellation of great men who appeared
in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never
any such society j — yet their genius failed them
to find out the best head in the universe. Our
poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see
the mountain near. It took a century to make it
suspected ; and not until two centuries had passed,
after his death, did any criticism which we think
adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to
write the history of Shakspeare till now ; for he
is the father of German literature : it was on the
introduction of Shakspeare into German, by Les-
sing, and the translation of his works by Wieland
and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German lit-
erature was most intimately connected. It was
not until the nineteenth century, whose specula-
tive genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the
tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought,
are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon be-

202 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

yond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears
are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge
and Goethe are the only critics who have ex-
pressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity :
but there is in all cultivated minds a silent ap-
preciation of his superlative power and beauty,
which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all
directions, advertised the missing facts, offered
money for any information that will lead to proof ;
and with what result? Beside some important
illustration of the history of the English stage, to
which I have adverted, they have gleaned a few
facts touching the property, and dealings in regard
to property, of the poet. It appears that, from
year to year, he owned a larger share in the
Blackfriars' Theatre : its wardrobe and other
appurtenances were his : that he bought an estate
in his native village, with his earnings, as writer
and shareholder ; that he lived in the best house
in Stratford ; was intrusted by his neighbors with
their commissions in London, as of borrowing
money, and the like ; that he was a veritable
farmer. About the time when he was writing
Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-
court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten
pence, for corn delivered to him at different times ;
and, in all respects, appears as a good husband,

SHAKSPEARE J OR, THE POET. 203

with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He
was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and
shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking
manner distinguished from other actors and
managers. I admit the importance of this infor-
mation. It was well worth the pains that have
been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning
his condition these researches may have rescued,
they can shed no light upon that infinite inven-
tion which is the concealed magnet of his attrac-
tion for us. We are very clumsy writers of
history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,
birth, birth-place, schooling, school-mates, earning
of money, marriage, publication of books, celeb-
rity, death ; and when we have come to an end of
this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it
and the goddess-born ; and it seems as if, had we
dipped at random into the "Modern Plutarch,"
and read any other life there, it would have fitted
the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to
spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from
the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier,
have wasted their oil. The famed theatres,
Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tre-
mont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick,
Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives

204 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

to this genius ; him they crown, elucidate, obey,
and express. The genius knows them not. The
recitation begins ; one golden word leaps out
immortal from all this painted pedantry, and
sweetly torments us with invitations to its own
inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once
to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the
pride of the English stage ; and all I then heard,
and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was
that in which the tragedian had no part j simply,
Hamlet's question to the ghost, —

" What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon ? "

That imagination which dilates the closet he
writes in to the world's dimension, crowds it
with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces
the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon.
These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illu-
sions of the green-room. Can any biography
shed light on the localities into which the
Midsummer Night's Dream admits me ? Did
Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish
recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the
genesis of that delicate creation ? The forest of
Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the moon-
light of Portia's villa, " the antres vast and desarts

} THE POET. 205

idle," of Othello's captivity. — where is the third
cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of
accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word
of those transcendent secrets ? In fine, in this
drama, as in all great works of art, — in the!
Cyclopsean architecture of Egypt and India ; in j
the Phidian sculpture ; the Gothic minsters ; thei
Italian painting ; the Ballads of Spain and Scot-f
land. — the Genius draws up the ladder after him r j
when the creative age goes up to heaven, and]
gives way to a new, who see the works, and ask
in vain for a history.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shak-
speare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to the
Shakspeare in us ; that is, to our most apprehen-
sive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from
off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspi-
rations. Read the antique documents extricated^
analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce
and Collier ; and now read one of those skieyl
sentences, — aerolites, — which seem to havel
fallen out of heaven, and which, not your expe-/
rience, but the man within the breast, has accepted
as words of fate ; and tell me if they match ; if
the former account in any manner for the latter ;
or, which gives the most historical insight into the
man.

Hence, though our external history is so mea-
18

206 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

gre, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead
of Aubrey and RoAve, we have really the in-
formation which is material, that which describes
character and fortune, that which, if we were
about to meet the man and deal with him, would
most import us to know. We have his recorded
convictions on those questions which knock for
answer at every heart, — on life and death, on love,
on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and
the ways whereby we come at them ; on the
characters of men, and the influences, occult and
open, which affect their fortunes : and on those
mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy
our science, and which yet interweave their mal-
ice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who
ever read the volume of the Sonnets, without
finding that the poet had there revealed, under
masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the
lore of friendship and of love ; the confusion of
sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the
same time, the most intellectual of men ? What
trait of his private mind has he hidden in his"
dramas ? One can discern, in his ample pictures
of the gentleman and the king, what forms and
humanities pleased him ; his delight in troops of
friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving.
Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the mer-
chant, answer for his great heart. So far from

OR, THE POET. 207

Shakspeare's being the least known, he is the
one person, in all modern history, known to us.
What point of morals, of manners, of economy,
of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the con-
duct of life, has he not settled ? What mystery
has he not signified his knowledge of? What
office, or function, or district of man's work, has
he not remembered ? What king has he not
taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon ? What
maiden has not found him finer than her deli-
cacy ? What lover has he not outloved ? What
sage has he not outseen ? What gentleman has
he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior ?
Some able and appreciating critics think no
criticism on Shakspeare valuable, that does not
rest purely on the dramatic merit ; that he is
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as
highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but
still think it secondary. He was a full man, who
liked to talk ; a brain exhaling thoughts and im-
ages, which, seeking vent, found the drama next
at hand. Had he been less, we should have had
to consider how well he filled his place, how good
a dramatist he was, — and he is the best in the
world. Bat it turns out, that what he has to say
is of that weight, as to withdraw some attention
from the vehicle ; and he is like some saint whose
history is to be rendered into all languages, into

208 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut
up into proverbs ; so that the occasion which gave
the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial,
compared with the universality of its application.
So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book
of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern
music : he wrote the text of modern life • the
text of manners : he drew the man of England
and Europe ; the father of the man in America :
he drew the man, and described the day, and
what is done in it : he read the hearts of men and
women, their probity, and their second thought,
and wiles ; the wiles of innocence, and the transi-
tions by which virtues and vices slide into their
contraries : he could divide the mother's part from
the father's part in the face of the child, or draw
the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate : he
knew the laws of repression which make the
police of nature : and all the sweets and all the
terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but
as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And
the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the
form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis
like making a question concerning the paper on
which a king's message is written.

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of
eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He

SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 209

is inconceivably wise ; the others, conceivably. A
good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
and think from thence ; but not into Shakspeare's.
We are still out of doors. For executive faculty,
for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of
subtlety compatible with an individual self, — the
subtilest of authors, and only just within the pos-
sibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life,
is the equal endowment of imaginative and of
lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his
legend with form and sentiments, as if they were
people who had lived under his roof; and few
real men have left such distinct characters as these
fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet
as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string.
An omnipresent humanity coordinates all his fac-
ulties. Give a man of talents a story to tell,
and his partiality will presently appear. He has
certain observations, opinions, topics, which have
some accidental prominence, and which he dis-
poses all to exhibit. He crams this part, and
starves that other part, consulting not the fitness
of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But
Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate
topic ; but all is duly given ; no veins, no curiosi-
ties : no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no manner-
18*

210 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

ist is he : he has no discoverable egotism : the
great he tells greatly ; the small, subordinately.
He is wise without emphasis or assertion ; he is
strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into
mountain slopes without effort, and by the same
rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as
well to do the one as the other. This makes that
equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and
love-songs j a merit so incessant, that each reader
is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the
inmost truth of things into music and verse,
makes him the type of the poet, and has added
a new problem to metaphysics. This is that
which throws him into natural history, as a main
production of the globe, and as announcing new
eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in
his poetry without loss or blur : he could paint
the fine with precision, the great with compass ;
the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without
any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful
execution into minute details, to a hair point ;
finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he
draws a mountain ; and yet these, like nature's,
will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that
more or less of production, more or fewer pictures,
is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make

OR, THE POET. 211

one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one
flower etch its image on his plate of iodine ; and
then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There
are always objects ; hut there was never represen-
tation. Here is perfect representation, at last ; and
now let the world of figures sit for their portraits.
No recipe can he given for the making of a
Shakspeare ; but the possibility of the translation
of things into song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece.
The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the
splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they :
and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of
the piece ; like the tone of voice of some incom-
parable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings,
and any clause as unproducible now as a whole
poem.

Though the speeches in the plays, and single
lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause
on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is
so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its
foregoers and followers, that the logician is satis-
fied. His means are as admirable as his ends ;
every subordinate invention, by which he helps
himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites,
is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount
and walk, because his horses are running off with
him in some distant direction : he always rides.

212 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

The finest poetry was first experience : but
the thought has suffered a transformation since it
was an experience. Cultivated men often attain
a good degree of skill in writing verses ; but it is
easy to read, through their poems, their personal
history : any one acquainted with parties can
name every figure : this is Andrew, and that is
Rachel. The sense thus remains prcsaic. It is
a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly.
In the poet's mind, the fact has gone quite over
into the new element of thought, and has lost all
that is exnvial. This generosity abides with
Shakspeare. We say, from the truth and close-
ness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by
heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the
poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which
no man can be a pcet, — for beauty is his aim. He
loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its
grace : he delights in the world, in man, in
woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from
them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he
sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates, that
poetry hath such charms that a lover might for-
sake his mistress to partake of them. And the
true bards have been noted for their firm and
cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine ; Chau-
cer is glad and erect ; and Saadi says, " It was

213

rumored abroad that I was penitent ; but what
had I to do with repentance ? " Not less sov-
ereign and cheerful, — much more sovereign and
cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. His name
suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of
men. If he should appear in any company of
human souls, who would not march in his troop ?
He touches nothing that does not borrow health
and longevity from his festal style.

And now, how stands the account of man with
this bard and benefactor, when in solitude, shut-
ting our ears to the reverberations of his fame,
we seek to strike the balance ? Solitude has
austere lessons ; it can teach us to spare both
heroes and poets ; and it weighs Shakspeare also,
and finds him to share the halfness and imperfec-
tion of humanity.

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the
splendor of meaning that plays over the visible
world ; knew that a tree had another use than
for apples, and corn another than for meal, and
the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads :
that these things bore a second and finer harvest
to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and
conveying in all their natural history a certain
mute commentary on human life. Shakspeare
employed them as colors to compose his picture.

214 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

He rested in their "beauty ; and never took the
step which seemed inevitable to snch genius,
namely, to explore the virtue which resides in
these symbols, and imparts this power, — what is
that which they themselves say ? He converted
the elements, which waited on his command, into
entertainments. He was master of the revels to
mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through
majestic powers of science, the comets given into
his hand, or the planets and their moons, and
should draw them from their orbits to glare with
the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and
advertise in all towns, " very superior pyrotechny
this evening!" Are the agents of nature, and
the power to understand them, worth no more
than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar ?
One remembers again the trumpet-text in the
Koran, — " The heavens and the earth, and all
that is between them, think ye we have created
them in jest ? " As long as the question is of
talent and mental power, the world of men has
net his equal to show. But when the question
is to life, and its materials, and its auxiliaries, how
dees he profit me ? What does it signify ? It is
but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night's
Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale : what sig-
nifies another picture more or less ? The Egyptian

SHAKSPEARE ] OR, THE POET. 215

verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind,
that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can
net marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable
men have led lives in some sort of keeping with
their thought ; but this man, in wide contrast.
Had he been less, had he reached only the com-
mon measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton,
Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the
twilight of human fate : bat, that this man of
men, he who gave to the science of mind a new
and larger subject than had ever existed, and
planted the standard of humanity some furlongs
forward into Chaos, — that he should net be wise
for himself, — it must even go into the world's
history, that the best poet led an obscure and
profane life, using his genius for the public
amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,
German, and Swede, beheld the same objects :
they also saw through them that which was
contained. And to what purpose ? The beauty
straightway vanished ; they read commandments,
all-excluding mountainous duty ; an obligation,
a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them,
and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's
progress, a probation, beleaguered round with
doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse, behind

216 REPRESENTATIVE MEN,

us ; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal
fires before us ; and the heart of the seer and the
heart of the listener sank in them.

It must be conceded that these are half-views
of half-men. The world still wants its poet-
priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shak-
speare the player, nor shall grope in graves with
Swedenborg the mourner ; but who shall see,
speak, and act, with equal inspiration. For know-
ledge will brighten the sunshine ; right is more
beautiful than private affection ; and love is com-
patible with universal wisdom.

NAPOLEON;

OR,

THE MAN OF THE WORLD

VI.

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD.

Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth
century, Bonaparte is far the best known, and the
most powerful ; and owes his predominance to
the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of
thought and belief, the aims of the masses of
active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg's
theory, that every organ is made up of homo-
geneous particles j or, as it is sometimes expressed,
every whole is made of similars ; that is, the
lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs;
the liver, of infinitely small livers ; the kidney,
of little kidneys, &c. Following this analogy,
if any man is found to carry with him the power
and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is
France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the
people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

In our society, there is a standing antagonism
between the conservative and the democratic

220 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

classes ; between those who have made their
fortunes, and the young and the poor who have
fortunes to make ; between the interests of dead
labor, — that is, the labor of hands long ago still in
the grave, which labor is now entombed in money
stocks, or in land and buildings owned by idle
capitalists, — and the interests of living labor,
which seeks to possess itself of land, and build-
ings, and money stocks. The first class is timid,
selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and contin-
ually losing numbers by death. The second class
is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying,
always outnumbering the other, and recruiting its
numbers every hour by births. It desires to keep
open every avenue to the competition of all, and
to multiply avenues; — the class of business men
in America, in England, in France, and through-
out Europe ; the class of industry and skill. Na-
poleon is its representative. The instinct of
active, brave, able men, throughout the middle
class every where, has pointed out Napoleon as
the incarnate Democrat. He had their virtues
and their vices; above all, he had their spirit
or aim. That tendency is material, pointing at
a sensual success, and employing the richest and
most various means to that end ; conversant with
mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely
and accurately learned and skilful, but subordi-

napoleon; or, the man of the world. 221

nating all intellectual and spiritual forces into
means to a material success. To be the rich
man, is the ead. " God has granted," says the
Koran, " to every people a prophet in its own
tongue." Paris, and London, and New York,
the spirit of commerce, of money, and material
power, were also to have their prophet ; and
Bonaparte was qualified and sent.

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes,
or memoirs, or lives of Napoleon, delights in the
page, because he studies in it his own history.
Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the high-
est point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the
newspapers. He is no saint, — to use his own
word, "no capuchin," and he is no hero, in the
high sense. The man in the street finds in him
the qualities and powers of other men in the
street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a
citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived
at such a commanding position, that he could in^
dulge all those tastes which the common man
possesses, but is obliged to conceal and deny :
good society, good books, fast travelling, dress,
dinners, servants without number, personal weight,
the execution of his ideas, the standing in the
attitude of a benefactor to all persons about
him, the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues,
music, palaces, and conventional honors, — pre*
19*

222

REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

cisely what is agreeable to the heart of every
ma]] in the nineteenth century, — this powerful
man possessed.

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of
adaptation to the mind of the masses around him,
becomes not merely representative, but actually a
monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus
Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every
gocd word, that was spoken in France. Dumont
relates, that he sat in the gallery of the Conven-
tion, and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It
struck Dumont that he could fit it with a pero-
ration, which he wrote in pencil immediately,
and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him.
Lord Elgin approved it, and Dumont, in the
evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read
it, pronounced it admirable, and declared he would
incorporate it into his harangue, to-morrow, to
the Assembly. " It is impossible/' said Dumont,
" as, unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord
Elgin." " If ypu have shown it to Lord Elgin,
and to fifty persons beside, I shall still speak
it to-morrow : " and he did speak it, with
much effect, at the next day's session. For
Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality, felt
that these things, which his presence inspired,
were as much his own, as if he had said them,
and that his adoption of them gave them their

NAPOLEON ; OR ; THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 223

weight. Much more absolute and centralizing
was the successor to Mirabeau's popularity, and
to much more than his predominance in France.
Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp almost ceases
to have a private speech and opinion. He is so
largely receptive, and is so placed, that he comes
to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit, and
power, of the age and country. He gains the
battle ; he makes the code ; he makes the system
of weights and measures ; he levels the Alps ; he
builds the road. All distinguished engineers,
savans, statists, report to him : so, likewise, do all
good heads in every kind : he adopts the best
measures, sets his stamp on them, and not these
alone, but on every happy and memorable expres-
sion. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and
every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it
is the sense of France.

Bonaparte was the idol of common men,
because he had in transcendent degree the qual-
ities and powers of common men. There is a
certain satifaction in coming down to the lowest
ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and
hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, in common with
that great class he represented, for power and
wealth, — but Bonaparte, specially, without any
scruple as to the means. All the sentiments
which embarrass men's pursuit of these objects,

224 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

he set aside. The sentiments were for women
and children. Fontanes, in 1804, expressed
Napoleon's own sense, when, in behalf of the
Senate, he addressed him, — " Sire, the desire of
perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted
the human mind." The advocates of liberty,
and of progress, are " ideologists ; " — a word
of contempt often in his mouth ; — " Necker is
an ideologist : " " Lafayette is an ideologist."

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares
that, " if you would succeed, you must not be
too good." It is an advantage, within certain
limits, to have renounced the dominion of the
sentiments of piety, gratitude, and generosity ;
since, what was an impassable bar to us, and still
is to others, becomes a convenient iveapon for
our purposes ; just as the river which was a
formidable barrier, winter transforms into the
smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments
and affections, and would help himself with his
hands and his head. With him is no miracle,
and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron,
in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in mon-
ey, and in troops, and a very consistent and wise
master-workman. He is never weak and literary,
but acts with the solidity and the precision of
natural agents. He has not lost his native sense

NAPOLEON ; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 225

and sympathy with things. Men give way be-
fore such a man, as before natural events. To
be sure, there are men enough who are immersed
in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors, and me-
chanics generally ; and we know how real and
solid such men appear in the presence of scholars
and grammarians : but these men ordinarily lack
the power of arrangement, and are like hands
without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to
this mineral and animal force, insight and gene-
ralization, so that men saw in him combined the
natural and the intellectual power, as if the sea
and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher.
Therefore the land and sea seem to presuppose
him. He came unto his own, and they received
him. This ciphering operative knows what he
is working with, and what is the product. He
knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels
and ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required
that each should do after its kind.

The art of war was the game in which he
exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, according to
him, in having always more forces than the ene-
my, on the point where the enemy is attacked,
or where he attacks : and his whole talent is
strained by endless manoeuvre and evolution, to
march always on the enemy at an angle, and
destroy his forces in detail. It is obvious that

226 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeu-
vring, so as always to bring two men against one
at the point of engagement, will be an over-
match for a much larger body of men.

The times, his constitution, and his early circum-
stances, combined to develop this pattern demo-
crat. He had the virtues of his class, and the
conditions for their activity. That common sense,
which no sooner respects any end, than it finds
the means to effect it ; the delight in the use of
means ; in the choice, simplification, and com-
bining of means; the directness and thorough-
ness of his work ; the prudence with which all
was seen, and the energy with which all was
done, make him the natural organ and head of
what I may almost call, from its extent, the
modern party.

Nature must have far the greatest share in every
success, and so in his. Such a man was wanted,
and such a man was born ; a man of stone and
iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or
seventeen hours, of going many days together
without rest or food, except by snatches, and with
the speed and spring of a tiger in action ; a man
not embarrassed by any scruples : compact, in-
stant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which
did not suffer itself to be baulked or misled by any
pretences of others, or any superstition, or any

NAPOLEON J OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 22T

heat or haste of his own. " My hand of iron,"
he said, " was not at the extremity of my arm j
it was immediately connected with my head."
He respected the power of nature and fortune,
and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of valu-
ing himself, like inferior men, on his opinionative-
ness, and waging war with nature. His favorite
rhetoric lay in allusion to his star ; and he pleased
himself, as well as the people, when he styled
himself the "Child of Destiny." " They charge
me," he said, " with the commission of great
crimes : men of my stamp do not commit crimes.
Nothing has been more simple than my elevation :
'tis in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime : it
was owing to the peculiarity of the times, and to
my reputation of having fought well against the
enemies of my country. I have always marched
with the opinion of great masses, and with events.
Of what use, then, would crimes be to me ? "
Again he said, speaking of his son, " My son can
not replace me ; I could not replace myself. I
am the creature of circumstances."

He had a directness of action never before
combined with so much comprehension. He is a
realist, terrific to all talkers, and confused truth-
obscuring persons. He sees where the matter
hinges, throws himself on the precise point of
resistance, and slights all other considerations.

228 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

He is strong in the right manner, namely, by in-
sight. He never blundered into victory, but won
his battles in his head, before he won them on
the field. His principal means are in himself. He
asks counsel of no other. In 1796, he writes to
the Directory ; " I have conducted the campaign
without consulting any one. I should have done
no good, if I had been under the necessity of
conforming to the notions of another person. I
have gained some advantages over superior forces,
and when totally destitute of every thing, because,
in the persuasion that your confidence was reposed
in me, my actions were as prompt as my thoughts."
History is full, down to this day, of the im-
becility of kings and governors. They are a
class of persons much to be pitied, for they
know not what they should do. The weavers
strike for bread ; and the king and his ministers,
not knowing what to do, meet them with
bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business.
Here was a man who, in each moment and
emergency, knew what to do next. It is an
immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits,
not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men
have any next ; they live from hand to mouth,
without plan, and are ever at the end of their
line, and, after each action, wait for an impulse
from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man

NAPOLEON ; OR, THE MAN OP THE WORLD. 229

of the world, if his ends had been purely public.
As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the
extraordinary unity of his action. He is firm,
sure, self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing every
thing to his aim, — money, troops, generals, and
his own safety also, to his aim ; not misled, like
common adventurers, by the splendor of his own
means. " Incidents ought not to govern policy,"
he said, "but policy, incidents." " To be hurried
away by every event, is to have no political
system at all." His victories were only so many
doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of
his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of the
present circumstance. He knew what to do, and
he flew to his mark. He would shorten a straight
line to come at his object. Horrible anecdotes
may, no doubt, be collected from his history, of
the price at which he bought his successes ; but
he must not therefore be set down as cruel ; but
only as one who knew no impediment to his
will ; not bloodthirsty, not cruel, — but wo to
what thing or person stood in his way ! Not
bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood, — and
pitiless. He saw only the object : the obstacle
must give way. " Sire, General Clarke can not
combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire
of the Austrian battery." — "Let him carry the
battery." — " Sire, every regiment that approaches
20

230 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

the heavy artillery is sacrificed : Sire, what
orders ? " — " Forward, forward !" Seruzier, a
colonel of artillery, gives, in his Military Memoirs,
the following sketch of a scene after the battle
of Austerlitz. — "At the moment in which the
Russian army was making its retreat, painfully,
but in good order, on the ice of the lake, the
Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed
toward the artillery. ' You are losing time,' he
cried ; ' fire upon those masses ; they must be
engulfed : fire upon the ice ! ' The order
remained unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain
several officers and myself were placed on the
slope of a hill to produce the effect : their balls
and mine rolled upon the ice, without breaking it
up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of
elevating light howitzers. The almost perpendic-
ular fall of the heavy projectiles produced the
desired effect. My method was immediately
followed by the adjoining batteries, and in less
than no time we buried " some * " thousands of
Russians and Austrians under the waters of the
lake."

In the plenitude of his resources, every obsta-
cle seemed to vanish. " There shall be no Alps,"

* As I quote at second hand, and cannot procure Seruzier, I
dare not adopt the high figure I find.

napoleon; or, the man of the world. 231

he said ; and he built his perfect roads, climbing
by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until
Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France.
He laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown.
Having decided what was to be done, he did that
with might and main. He put out all his strength.
He risked every thing, and spared nothing, neither
ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals,
nor himself.

We like to see every thing do its office after its
kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattle-snake ;
and, if fighting be the best mode of adjusting
national differences, (as large majorities of men
seem to agree,) certainly Bonaparte was right in
making it thorough. " The grand principle of
war," he said, " was, that an army ought always
to be ready, by day and by night, and at all hours,
to make all the resistance it is capable of making."
He never economized his ammunition, but, on a
hostile position, rained a torrent of iron, — shells,
balls, grape-shot, — to annihilate all defence. On
any point of resistance, he concentrated squadron
on squadron in overwhelming numbers, until it
was swept out of existence. To a regiment of
horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days before
the battle of Jena, Napoleon said, " My lads, you
must not fear death ; when soldiers brave death,
they drive him into the enemy's ranks." In the

232 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

fury of assault, he no more spared himself. He
went to the edge of his possibility. It is plain
that in Italy he did what he could, and all that
he could. He came, several times, within an
inch of ruin ; and his own person was all but
lost. He was flung into the marsh at Areola.
The Austrians were between him and his troops,
in the melee, and he was brought off with despe-
rate efforts. At Lonato, and at other places, he
was on the point of being taken prisoner. He
fought sixty battles. He had never enough.
Each victory was a new weapon. " My power
would fall, were I not to support it by new
achievments. Conquest has made me what I am,
and conquest must maintain me." He felt, with
every wise man, that as much life is needed for
conservation, as for creation. We are always in
peril, always in a bad plight, just on the edge of
destruction, and only to be saved by invention
and courage.

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the
coldest prudence and punctuality. A thunderbolt
in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his
intrenchments. His very attack was never the
inspiration of courage, but the result of calcula-
tion. His idea of the best defence consists in
being still the attacking party. u My ambition,"
he says, "was great, but was of a cold na-

NAPOLEON J OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 233

ture." In one of his conversations with Las
Casas, he remarked, " As to moral courage, I
have rarely met with the two-o'clock-in-the-
morning kind : I mean unprepared courage, that
which is necessary on an unexpected occasion ;
and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events,
leaves full freedom of judgment and decision : "
and he did not hesitate to declare that he was
himself eminently endowed with this " two-
o'clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he had
met with few persons equal to himself in this
respect."

Every thing depended on the nicety of his com-
binations, and the stars were not more punctual
than his arithmetic. His personal attention de-
scended to the smallest particulars. "At Monte-
bello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight
hundred horse, and with these he separated the
six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the
very eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry
was half a league off, and required a quarter of
an hour to arrive on the field of action ; and I
have observed, that it is always these quarters of
an hour that decide the fate of a battle." " Be-
fore he fought a battle, Bonaparte thought little
about what he should do in case of success, but a
great deal about what he should do in case of a
reverse of fortune." The same prudence and
20*

234 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

good sense mark all his behavior. His instruc-
tions to his secretary at the Tuilleries are worth
remembering. " During the night, enter my
chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake
me when you have any good news to communi-
cate ; with that there is no hurry. But when you
bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for then there
is not a moment to be lost." It was a whimsical
economy of the same kind which dictated his
practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his
burdensome correspondence. He directed Bour-
rienne to leave all letters unopened for three
weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how
large a part of the correspondence had thus dis-
posed of itself, and no longer required an answer.
His achievement of business was immense, and
enlarges the known powers of man. There have
been many working kings, from Ulysses to Wil-
liam of Orange, but none who accomplished a
tithe of this man's performance.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the
advantage of having been born to a private and
humble fortune. In his later days, he had the
weakness of wishing to add to his crowns and
badges the prescription of aristocracy : but he
knew his debt to his austere education, and made
no secret of his contempt for the born kings, and
for " the hereditary asses," as he coarsely styled

NAPOLEON I OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 235

the Bourbons. He said that, " in their exile, they
had learned nothing, and forgot nothing." Bon-
aparte had passed through all the degrees of mili-
tary service, but also was citizen before he was
emperor, and so has the key to citizenship. His
remarks and estimates discover the information
and justness of measurement of the middle class.
Those who had to deal with him, found that he
was not to be imposed upon, but could cipher as
well as another man. This appears in all parts
of his Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When
the expenses of the empress, of his household, of
his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon
examined the bills of the creditors himself, de-
tected overcharges and errors, and reduced the
claims by considerable sums.

His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom
he directed, he owed to the representative char-
acter which clothed him. He interests us as he
stands for France and for, Europe ; and he exists
as captain and king, only as far as the Revolution,
or the interest of the industrious masses, found
an organ and a leader in him. In the social
interests, he knew the meaning and value of
labor, and threw himself naturally on that side.
I like an incident mentioned by one of his biog-
raphers at St. Helena. " When walking with
Mrs. Balcombe, some servants, carrying heavy

236 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe
desired them, in rather an angry tone, to keep
back. Napoleon interfered, saying, ' Respect the
burden, Madam.' " In the time of the empire,
he directed attention to the improvement and
embellishment of the markets of the capital.
"The market-place," he said, "is the Louvre of
the common people." The principal works that
have survived him are his magnificent roads.
He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort
of freedom and companionship grew up between
him and them, which the forms of his court
never permitted between the officers and himself.
They performed, under his eye, that which no
others could do. The best document of his
relation to his troops is the order of the day
on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in
which Napoleon promises the troops that he will
keep his person out of reach of fire. This de-
claration, which is the reverse of that ordinarily
made by generals and sovereigns on the eve of a
battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the
army to their leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity
between Napoleon and the mass of the people,
his real strength lay in their conviction that he
was their representative in his genius and aims,
not only when he courted, but when he con-

NAPOLEON J OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 237

trolled and even when he decimated them by his
conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin
in France, how to philosophize on liberty and
equality ; and, when allusion was made to the
precious blood of centuries, which was spilled
by the killing of the Due d'Enghien, he sug-
gested, "Neither is my blood ditch-water." The
people felt that no longer the throne was occu-
pied, and the land sucked of its nourishment,
by a small class of legitimates, secluded from all
community with the children of the soil, and
holding the ideas and superstitions of a long-
forgotten state of society. Instead of that vam-
pyre, a man of themselves held, in the Tuilleries,
knowledge and ideas like their own, opening, of
course, to them and their children, all places of
power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish
policy, ever narrowing the means and opportuni-
ties of young men, was ended, and a day of
expansion and demand was come. A market for
all the powers and productions of man was
opened ; brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes of
youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal
Prance was changed into a young Ohio or New
York ; and those who smarted under the imme-
diate rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them,
as the necessary severities of the military system
which had driven out the oppressor. And even

238 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

when the majority of the people had begun to
ask, whether they had really gained any thing
under the exhausting levies of men and money
of the new master, — the whole talent of the
country, in every rank and kindred, took his
part, and defended him as its natural patron.
In 1814, when advised to rely on the higher
classes, Napoleon said to those around him,
" Gentlemen, in the situation in which I
stand, my only nobility is the rabble of the
Faubourgs."

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The
necessity of his position required a hospitality to
every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts j
and his feeling went along with this policy.
Like every superior person, he undoubtedly felt
a desire for men and compeers, and a wish to
measure his power with other masters, and an
impatience of fools and underlings. In Italy, he
sought for men, and found none. " Good God ! "
he said, " how rare men are ! There are eighteen
millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found
two, — Dandolo and Melzi." In later years, with
larger experience, his respect for mankind was
not increased. In a moment of bitterness, he
said, to one of his oldest friends, " Men deserve
the contempt with which they inspire me. I
have only to put some gold lace on the coat of

NAPOLEON ; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 239

my virtuous republicans, and they immediately
become just what I wish them." This impatience
at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of
respect to those able persons who commanded his
regard, not only when he found them friends and
coadjutors, but also when they resisted his will.
He could not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot,
Lafayette, and Bernadotte, with the danglers of
his court ; and, in spite of the detraction which
his systematic egotism dictated toward the great
captains who conquered with and for him, ample
acknowledgments are made by him to Lannes,
Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, Murat, Ney, and
Augereau. If he felt himself their patron, and
the founder of their fortunes, as when he said, "I
made my generals out of mud," he could not hide
his satisfaction in receiving from them a second-
ing and support commensurate with the grandeur
of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign, he
was so much impressed by the courage and
resources of Marshal Ney, that he said, " I have
two hundred millions in my coffers, and I would
give them all for Ney." The characters which
he has drawn of several of his marshals, are
discriminating, and, though they did not content
the insatiable vanity of French officers, are, no
doubt, substantially just. And, in fact, every
species of merit was sought and advanced under

240 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

his government. " I know," he said, " the depth
and draught of water of every one of my gen-
erals." Natural power was sure to be well
received at his court. Seventeen men, in his
time, were raised from common soldiers to the
rank of king, marshal, duke, or general • and the
crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to
personal valor, and not to family connexion.
" When soldiers have been baptized in the fire
of a battle-field, they have all one rank in my
eyes."

When a natural king becomes a titular king,
every body is pleased and satisfied. The Revolu-
tion entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg
St. Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder-
monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon, as
flesh of his flesh, and the creature of his party :
but there is something in the success of grand
talent which enlists an universal sympathy. For,
in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity
and malversation, all reasonable men have an
interest ; and, as intellectual beings, we feel the
air purified by the electric shock, when material
force is overthrown by intellectual energies. As
soon as we are removed out of the reach of local
and accidental partialities, man feels that Napoleon
fights for him ; these are honest victories ; this
strong steam-engine does our work. Whatever

NAPOLEON ; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 241

appeals to the imagination, by transcending the
ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully
encourages and liberates us. This capacious
head, revolving and disposing sovereignly trains
of affairs, and animating such multitudes of
agents ; this eye, w^hich looked through Europe ;
this prompt invention ; this inexhaustible resource ;
— w T hat events! w^hat romantic pictures! what
strange situations ! — when spying the Alps, by a
sunset in the Sicilian sea ; drawing up his army
for battle, in sight of the Pyramids, and saying
to his troops, " From the tops of those pyramids,
forty centuries look down on you ; " fording the
Red Sea ; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of
Suez. On the shore of Plotemais, gigantic
projects agitated him, " Had Acre fallen, I
should have changed the face of the w^orld."
His army, on the night of the battle of Austerlitz,
which was the anniversary of his inauguration as
Emperor, presented him with a bouquet of forty
standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a
little puerile, the pleasure he took in making these
contrasts glaring ; as when he pleased himself
with making kings wait in his antechambers, at
Tilsit, at Paris, and at Erfurt.

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, inde-
cision, and indolence of men, sufficiently congrat-
ulate ourselves on this strong and readv actor, who
21

242 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

took occasion by the beard, and showed us how
much may be accomplished by the mere force of
such virtues as all men possess in less degrees ;
namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by
courage, and thoroughness. " The Austrians,"
he said, "do not know the value of time." I
should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model
of prudence. His power does not consist in any
wild or extravagant force ; in any enthusiasm,
like Mahomet's ; or singular power of persuasion ;
but in the exercise of common sense on each
emergency, instead of abiding by rules and cus-
toms. The lesson he teaches is that which
vigor always teaches, — that there is always room
for it. To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not
that man's life an answer. When he appeared, it
was the belief of all military men that there could
be nothing new in war ; as it is the belief of men
to-day, that nothing new can be undertaken in
politics, or in church, or in letters, or in trade, or
in farming, or in our social manners and customs ;
and as it is, at all times, the belief of society that
the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew bet-
ter than society ; and, moreover, knew that he
knew better. I think all men know better than
they do ; know that the institutions we so volubly
commend are go-carts and baubles ; but they dare
not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied

NAPOLEON ; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 243

on his own sense, and did not care a bean for other
people's. The world treated his novelties just as
it treats every body's novelties. — made infinite ob-
jection ; mustered all the impediments : but he
snapped his ringer at their objections. " What
creates great difficulty," he remarks, " in the pro-
fession of the land-commander, is the necessity
cf feeding so many men and animals. If he
allows himself to be guided by the commissaries,
he will never stir, and all his expeditions will
fail." An example of his common sense is what
he says of the passage of the Alps in winter,
which, all writers, one repeating after the other,
had described as impracticable. " The winter,"
says Napoleon, " is not the most unfavorable sea-
son for the passage of lofty mountains. The
snow is then firm, the iveather settled, and there
is nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and
only danger to be apprehended in the Alps. On
these high mountains, there are often very fine
days in December, of a dry cold, with extreme
calmness in the air." Read his account, too, of
the way in which battles are gained. " In all
battles, a moment occurs, when the bravest troops,
after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined
to run. That terror proceeds from a want of con-
fidence in their own courage ; and it only requires
a slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore conn-

244 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

dence to them. The art is to give rise to the
opportunity, and to invent the pretence. At
Areola, I won the battle with twenty-five horse-
men. I seized that moment of lassitude, gave
every man a trumpet, and gained the day with
this handful. You see that two armies are two
bodies which meet, and endeavor to frighten each
other : a moment of panic occurs, and that mo-
ment must be turned to advantage. When a man
has been present in many actions, he distinguishes
that moment without difficulty : it is as easy as
casting up an addition."

This deputy of the nineteenth century added
to his gifts a capacity for speculation on general
topics. He delighted in running through the
range of practical, of literary, and of abstract
questions. His opinion is always original, and to
the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt, he liked,
after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to
support a proposition, and as many to oppose it.
He gave a subject, and the discussions turned
on questions of religion, the different kinds of
government, and the art of war. One day, he
asked, whether the planets were inhabited ? On
another, what was the age of the world ? Then
he proposed^ to consider the probability of the des-
truction of the globe, either by water or by fire :
at another time, the truth or fallacy of presenti-

THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 245

merits, and the interpretation of dreams. He was
very fond of talking of religion. In 1S06, he
conversed with Fournier, bishop of Montpellier,
on matters of theology. There were two points
on which they could not agree, viz., that of hell,
and that of salvation out of the pale of the church.
The Emperor told Josephine, that he disputed like
a devil on these two points, on which the bishop
was inexorable. To the philosophers he readily
yielded all that was proved against religion as the
work of men and time ; but he would not hear
of materialism. One fine night, on deck, amid a
clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the
stars, and said, " You may talk as long as you
please, gentlemen, but who made all that ? " He
delighted in the conversation of men of science,
particularly of Monge and Berthollet ; but the
men of letters he slighted ; " they were manufac-
turers of phrases." Of medicine, too, he was
fond of talking, and with those of its practition-
ers whom he most esteemed, — with Corvisart at
Paris, and with Antonomarchi at St. Helena.
" Relieve me," he said to the last, " we had
better leave off all these remedies : life is a fort-
ress which neither you nor I know any thing
about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its
defence ? Its own means are superior to all the
apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart candidly
21*

246 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

agreed with me, that all your filthy mixtures are
good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of
uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken
collectively, are more fatal than useful to man-
kind. Water, air, and cleanliness, are the chief
articles in my pharmacopeia."

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and
General Gourgaud, at St. Helena, have great
value, after all the deduction that, it seems, is to
be made from them, on account of his known
disingenuousness. He has the good-nature of
strength and conscious superiority. I admire his
simple, clear narrative of his battles; — good as
Caesar's ; his good-natured and sufficiently re-
spectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his
other antagonists, and his own equality as a
writer to. his varying subject. The most agree-
able portion is the Campaign in Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In inter-
vals of leisure, either in the camp or the palace,
Napoleon appears as a man of genius, directing
on abstract questions the native appetite for truth,
and the impatience of words, he was wont to
show in war. He could enjoy every play of
invention, a romance, a bon mot, as well as a
stratagem in a campaign. He delighted to fasci-
nate Josephine and her ladies, in a dim-lighted
apartment, by the terrors of a fiction, to which

NAPOLEON J OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 247

his voice and dramatic power lent every addi-
tion.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the
middle class of modern society ; of the throng
who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses,
manufactories, ships, of the modern world, aim-
ing to be rich. He was the agitator, the de-
stroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the
liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the
opener of doors and markets, the subverter of
monopoly and abuse. Of course, the rich and
aristocratic did not like him. England, the cen-
tre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of
tradition and genealogy, opposed him. The con-
sternation of the dull and conservative classes,
the terror of the foolish old men and old women
of the Roman conclave, — who in their despair
took hold of any thing, and would cling to red-
hot iron, — the vain attempts of statists to amuse
and deceive him, of the emperor of Austria to
bribe him ; and the instinct of the young, ardent,
and active men, every where, which pointed him
out as the giant of the middle class, make his
history bright and commanding. He had the
virtues of the masses of his constituents : he had
also their vices. I am sorry that the brilliant
picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal
quality which we discover in our pursuit of

248 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

wealth, that it is treacherous, and is bought by
the breaking cr weakening of the sentiments :
and it is inevitable that we should find the same
fact in the history of this champion, who pro-
posed to himself simply a brilliant career, without
any stipulation cr scruple concerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous
sentiments. The highest-placed individual in
the mcst cultivated age and population of the
world, — he has net the merit of common truth
and honesty. He is unjust to his generals ;
egotistic, and monopolizing ; meanly stealing the
credit of their great actions from Kellermann,
from Eernadctte ; intriguing to involve his faith-
ful Jimet in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to
drive him to a distance from Paris, because the
familiarity of his manners offends the new pride
of his throne. He is a boundless liar. The
official paper, his " Moniteurs," and all his bul-
letins, are proverbs for saying what he wished to
be believed ; and worse, — he sat, in his premature
eld age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying
facts, and dates, and characters, and giving to
history a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen,
he has a passion for stage effect. Every action
that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this
calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doc-
trine of the immortality of the soul, are all

NAPOLEON t OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 249

French. " I must dazzle and astonish. If I
were to give the liberty of the press, my power
could not last three days." To make a great
noise is his favorite design. « A great reputation
is a great noise : the more there is made, the
farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, mon-
uments, nations, all fall • but the noise continues,
and resounds in after ages." His doctrine of im-
mortality is simply fame. His theory of influence
is not nattering. " There are two levers for moving
men, — interest and fear. Love is a silly infatua-
tion, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name.
I love nobody. I do not even love my brothers :
perhaps Joseph, a little, from habit, and because
he is my elder ; and Duroc, I love him too ; but
why ? — because his character pleases me : he is
stern and resolute, and, I believe, the fellow
never shed a tear. For my part, I know very
well that I have no true friends. As long as I
continue to be what I am, I may have as many
pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility
to women : but men should be firm in heart and
purpose, or they should have nothing to do with
war and government." He was thoroughly un-
scrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate,
drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. He
had no generosity ; but mere vulgar hatred : he
was intensely selfish : he was perfidious : he

250 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

cheated at cards: he was a prodigious gossip;
and opened letters : and delighted iu his infamous
police ; and rubbed his hands with joy when he
had intercepted some morsel of intelligence con-
cerning the men and women about him, boasting
that ' ; he knew every thing ; " and interfered
with the cutting the dresses of the women ; and
listened after the hurrahs and the compliments
of the street, incognito. His manners were
coarse. He treated women with low familiarity.
He had the habit of pulling their ears, and pinch-
ing their cheeks, when he was in good humor,
and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and
of striking and horse-play with them, to his last
days. It does not appear that he listened at key-
holes, or, at least, that he was caught at it. In
short, when you have penetrated through all the
circles of power and splendor, you were net deal-
ing with a gentleman, at last ; but with an impos-
tor and a rogue : and he fully deserves the epithet
of Jupiter Scapm, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

In describing the two parties into which mod-
ern society divides itself, — the democrat and the
conservative, — I said, Bonaparte represents the
Democrat, or the party of men of business, against
the stationary or conservative party. 1 omitted
then to say, what is material to the statement,

NAPOLEON J OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 251

namely, that these two parties differ only as young
and eld. The democrat is a young conservative ;
the conservative is an old democrat. The aristo-
crat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed, — be-
cause both parties stand on the one ground cf the
supreme value of property, which one endeavors
to get, and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be
said to represent the whole history of this party,
its youth and its age ; yes, and with poetic justice,
its fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, the
counter-party, still waits for its organ and repre-
sentative, in a lover and a man of truly public
and universal aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favor-
able conditions, cf the powers of intellect withe ut
conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed,
and so weaponed ; never leader found such aids
and followers. And what was the result of this
vast talent and power, of these immense armies,
burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated
millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It
came to no result. All parsed away, like the
smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He left
France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it ;
and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun
again. The attempt was, in principle, suicidal.
Frstice served him with life, and limb, and estate,
as long as it could identify its interest with him \

252 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

but when men saw that after victory was another
war; after the destruction of armies, new con-
scriptions ; and they who had toiled so desperately
were never nearer to the reward, — they could not
spend what they had earned, nor repose on their
down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux, — they
deserted him. Men found that his absorbing
egotism was deadly to all other men. It resem-
bled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of
shocks on any one who takes hold of it, producing
spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so
that the man can not open his fingers ; and the ani-
mal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he
paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbi-
tant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed
the power and existence of those who served
him ; and the universal cry of France, and of
Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of him;" " as-
sez de Bonaparte."

It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that
in him lay, to live and thrive without moral prin-
ciple. It was the nature of things, the eternal
law of man and of the world, which baulked and
ruined him ; and the result, in a million experi-
ments, will be the same. Every experiment, by
multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual
and selfish aim, will fail. The pacific Fourier
will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon.

NAPOLEON J OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 253

As long as our civilization is essentially one of
property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be
mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us
sick ; there will be bitterness in our laughter ; and
our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good
profits, which we can taste with all doors open,
and which serves all men.
22

GOETHE:

THE WRITER

VII.

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER

I find a provision, in the constitution of the
world, for the writer or secretary, who is to report
the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that
every where throbs and works. His office is a
reception of the facts into the mind, and then a
selection of the eminent and characteristic expe-
riences.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged
in writing their history. The planet, the pebble,
goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock
leaves its scratches on the mountain ; the river, its
channel in the soil ; the animal, its bones in the
stratum ; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in
the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in
the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the
snow, or along the ground, but prints, in charac-
ters more or less lasting, a map of its march.
Every act of the man inscribes itself in the mem*
22*

258 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

ories of his fellows, arid in his own manners and
face. The air is full of sounds j the sky, of tokens ;
the ground is all memoranda and signatures ; and
every object covered over with hints, which speak
to the intelligent.

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and
the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither
exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature
strives upward ; and, in man, the report is some-
thing more than print of the seal. It is a new and
finer form of the original. The record is alive,
as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the
memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having
received the images of surrounding objects, is
touched with life, and disposes them in a new
order. The facts which transpired do not lie in
it inert ; but some subside, and others shine ; so
that soon we have a new picture, composed of the
eminent experiences. The man cooperates. He
loves to communicate ; and that which is for him
to say lies as a load on his heart until it is deliv-
ered. But, besides the universal joy of conversa-
tion, some men are born with exalted powers for
this second creation. Men are born to write.
The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and
peach-stone : his vocation is to be a planter of
plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair.
Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him

259

as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts
it all nonsense that they say, that some things
are undescribable. He believes that all that can
be thought can be written, first or last ; and he
would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.
Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes
therefore commended to his pen, — and he will
write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of re-
porting, and the universe is the possibility of being
reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds
new materials ; as our German poet said, " some
god gave me the power to paint what I surfer."
He draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting
rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely.
Vexations, and a tempest of passion, only fill his
sail ; as the good Luther writes, " When I am
angry, I can pray well, and preach well : " and,
if we knew the genesis of fine strokes of elo-
quence, they might recall the complaisance of
Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian
heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the
spasms in the muscles of the neck. His failures
are the preparation of his victories. A new
thought, or a crisis of passion, apprises him that
all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric,
— is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact.
What then ? Does he throw away the pen ? No ;
he begins again to describe in the new light

260 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

which has shined on him, — if, by some means,
he may yet save some true word. Nature con-
spires. Whatever can be thought can be spoken,
and still rises for utterance, though to rude and
stammering organs. If they cannot compass it,
it waits and works, until, at last, it moulds them
to its perfect will, and is articulated.

This striving after imitative expression, which
one meets every where, is significant of the aim
of nature, but is mere stenography. There are
higher degrees, and nature has more splendid
endowments for those whom she elects to a supe-
rior office ; for the class of scholars or writers,
who see connection where the multitude see
fragments, and who are impelled to exhibit
the facts in order, and so to supply the axis on
which the frame of things turns. Nature has
dearly at heart the formation of the speculative
man, or scholar. It is an end never lost sight of,
and is prepared in the original casting of things.
He is no permissive or accidental appearance, but
an organic agent, one of the estates of the
realm, provided and prepared, from of old and
from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture
of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him.
There is a certain heat in the breast, which at-
tends the perception of a primary truth, which is
the shining of the spiritual sun down into the

GOETHE J OR, THE WRITER. 261

shaft of the mine. Every thought which dawns
on the mind, in the moment of its emergence
announces its own rank, — whether it is some
whimsy, or whether it is a power.

If he have his incitements, there is, on the
other side, invitation and need enough of his
gift. Society has, at all times, the same want,
namely, of one sane man with adequate powers
of expression to hold up each object of mono-
mania in its right relations. The ambitious and
mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo,
whether tariff, Texas, railroad, Romanism, mes-
merism, or California ; and, by detaching the
object from its relations, easily succeed in making
it seen in a glare ; and a multitude go mad about
it, and they are not to be reproved or cured by
the opposite multitude, who are kept from this
particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another
crotchet. But let one man have the comprehen-
sive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in
its right neighborhood and bearings, — the illusion
vanishes, and the returning reason of the com-
munity thanks the reason of the monitor.

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he
must also wish with other men to stand well
with his contemporaries. But there is a certain
ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the
scholars or clerisy, which is of no import, unless

262 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

the scholar heed it. In this country, the em-
phasis of conversation, and of public opinion,
commends the practical man ; and the solid por-
tion of the community is named with significant
respect in every circle. Our people are of Bona-
parte's opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are
subversive of social order and comfort, and at
last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed,
the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to
Smyrna ; or, the running up and down to procure
a company of subscribers to set a-going five or
ten thousand spindles ; or, the negotiations of a
caucus, and the practising on the prejudices and
facility of country-people, to secure their votes in
November, — is practical and commendable.

If I were to compare action of a much higher
strain with a life of contemplation, I should not
venture to pronounce with much confidence in
favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep
stake in inward illumination, that there is much to
be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his
life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality,
a headiness, and loss of balance, is the tax which
all action mast pay. Act, if you like, — but you
do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong
for them. Show me a man who has acted, and
who has not been the victim and slave of his
action. What they have done commits and

GOETHE J OR, THE WRITER. 263

enforces them to do the same again. The first
act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a
sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his
aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and
his friends cleave to the form, and lose the
aspiration. The Quaker has established Quaker-
ism, the Shaker has established his monastery
and his dance ; and, although each prates of spirit,
there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-
spiritual. But where are his new things of
to-day ? In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback
appears : but in those lower activities, which
have no higher aim than to make us more com-
fortable and more cowardly, in actions of cun-
ning, actions that steal and lie, actions that
divorce the speculative from the practical faculty,
and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is
nothing else but drawback and negation. The
Hindoos write in their sacred books, "Children
only, and not the learned, speak of the specula-
tive and the practical faculties as two. They
are but one, for both obtain the selfsame end, and
the place which is gained by the followers of the
one, is gained by the followers of the other.
That man seeth, who seeth that the speculative
and the practical doctrines are one.' 7 For great
action must draw on the spiritual nature. The
measure of action is the sentiment from which it

B64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

proceeds. The greatest action may easily be
one of the most private circumstance.

This disparagement will not come from the
leaders, but from inferior persons. The robust
gentlemen who stand at the head of the practical
class, share the ideas of the time, and have too
much sympathy with the speculative class. It is
not from men excellent in any kind, that dis-
paragement of any other is to be looked for.
With such, Talleyrand's question is ever the main
one ; not, is he rich ? is he committed ? is he
well-meaning ? has he this or that faculty ? is he
of the movement ? is he of the establishment ? —
but, Is he any body? does he stand for some-
thing ? He must be good of his kind. That is
all that Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that
the common sense of mankind asks. Be real
and admirable, not as we know, but as you know.
Able men do not care in what kind a man is able,
so only that he is able. A master likes a master,
and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist,
craftsman, or king.

Society has really no graver interest than the
well-being of the literary class. And it is not to
be denied that men are cordial in their recognition
and welcome of intellectual accomplishments.
Still the writer does not stand with us on any
commanding ground. I think this to be his own

GOETHE ; OR, THE WRITER. 265

fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have
been times when he was a sacred person : he
wrote Bibles ; the first hymns ; the codes ; the
epics j tragic songs ; Sibylline verses ; Chaldean
oracles ; Laconian sentences, inscribed on temple
walls. Every word was true, and woke the na-
tions to new life. He wrote without levity, and
without choice. Every word was carved before
his eyes, into the earth and the sky ; and the sun
and stars were only letters of the same purport,
and of no more necessity. But how can he be
honored, when he does not honor himself; when
he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no
longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking
to the giddy opinion of a reckless public ; when
he must sustain with shameless advocacy some
bad government, or must bark, all the year round,
in opposition ; or write conventional criticism, or
profligate novels ; or, at any rate, write without
thought, and without recurrence, by day and by
night, to the sources of inspiration ?

Some reply to these questions may be furnished
by looking over the list of men of literary genius
in our age. Among these, no more instructive
name occurs than that of Goethe, to represent the
powers and duties of the scholar or writer.

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the
popular external life and aims of the nineteenth
23

266 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man
quite domesticated in the century, breathing its
air, enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier
time, and taking away, by his colossal parts, the
reproach of weakness, which, but for him, would
lie on the intellectual works of the period. He
appears at a time when a general culture has
spread itself, and has smoothed down all sharp
individual traits ; when, in the absence of heroic
characters, a social comfort and cooperation have
come in. There is no poet, but scores of poetic
writers ; no Columbus, but hundreds of post-
captains, with transit-telescope, barometer, and
concentrated soup and pemmican ; no Demosthe-
nes, no Chatham, but any number of clever par-
liamentary and forensic debaters ; no prophet or
saint, but colleges of divinity ; no learned man,
but learned societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms,
and book-clubs, without number. There was
never such a miscellany of facts. The world
extends itself like American trade. We conceive
Greek or Roman life, — life in the middle ages, —
to be a simple and comprehensible affair ; but
modern life to respect a multitude of things,
which is distracting.

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity ;
hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to
cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and

GOETHE J OR, THE WRITER. 267

sciences, and, by his own versatility, to dispose
of them with ease j a manly mind, unembarrassed
by the variety of coats of convention with
which life had got encrusted, easily able by his
subtlety to pierce these, and to draw his strength
from nature, with which he lived in full com-
munion. What is strange, too, he lived in a
small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state,
and in a time when Germany played no such
leading part in the world's affairs as to swell the
bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride,
such as might have cheered a French, or English,
or once, a Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is
no trace of provincial limitation in his muse.
He is not a debtor to his position, but was born
with a free and controlling genius.

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a
philosophy of literature set in poetry ; the work
of one who found himself the master of histories,
mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national
literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which
modern erudition, with its international inter-
course of the whole earth's population, researches
into Indian, Etruscan, and all Cyclopaean arts,
geology, chemistry, astronomy ; and every one
of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and
poetic character, by reason of the multitude.
One looks at a king with reverence ; but if one

268 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

should chance to be at a congress of kings, the
eye would take liberties with the peculiarities
of each. These are not wild miraculous songs,
but elaborate forms, to which the poet has con-
fided the results of eighty years of observation.
This reflective and critical wisdom makes the
poem more truly the flower of this time. It
dates itself. Still he is a poet, — poet of a prouder
laurel than any contemporary, and, under this
plague of microscopes, (for he seems to see out
of every pore of his skin,) strikes the harp with
a hero's strength and grace.

The wonder of the book is its superior intelli-
gence. In the menstruum of this man's wit, the
past and the present ages, and their religions,
politics, and modes of thinking, are dissolved into
archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies
sail through his head ! The Greeks said, that
Alexander went as far as Chaos : Goethe went,
only the other day, as far ; and one step farther
he hazarded, and brought himself safe back.

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his specu-
lation. The immense horizon which journeys
with us lends its majesty to trifles, and to matters
of convenience and necessity, as to solemn and
festal performances. He was the soul of his
century. If that was learned, and had become,
by population, compact organization, and drill of

GOETHE J OR, THE WRITER. 269

parts, one great Exploring Expedition, accumu-
lating a glut of facts and fruits too fast for any
hitherto-existing savans to classify, this man's
mind had ample chambers for the distribution of
all. He had a power to unite the detached atoms
again by their own law. He has clothed our
modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness
and detail, he detected the Genius of life, the old
cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, and
showed that the dulness and prose we ascribe to
the age was only another of his masks : —

"His very flight is presence in disguise : "

that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue
dress, and was not a wiiit less vivacious or rich
in Liverpool or the Hague, than once in Rome
or Antioch. He sought him in public squares
and main streets, in boulevards and hotels ; and,
in the solidest kingdom of routine and the senses,
he showed the lurking dsemonic power ; that, in
actions of routine, a thread of mythology and
fable spins itself: and this, by tracing the pedi-
gree of every usage and practice, every institu-
tion, utensil, and means, home to its origin in the
structure of man. He had an extreme impatience
of conjecture and of rhetoric. " I have guesses
enough of my own ; if a man write a book, let
him set down only what he knows." He writes
23*

270 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great
deal more than he writes, and putting ever a
thing for a word. He has explained the distinc-
tion between the antique and the modern spirit
and art. He has denned art, its scope and laws.
He has said the best things about nature that
ever were said. He treats nature as the old phi-
losophers, as the seven wise masters did, — and,
with whatever loss of French tabulation and
dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us ;
and they have some doctoral skill. Eyes are
better, on the whole, than telescopes or micro-
scopes. He has contributed a key to many parts
of nature, through the rare turn for unity and
simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested
the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf, or
the eye of a leaf, is the unit of botany, and that
every part of the plant is only a transformed leaf
to meet a new condition ; and, by varying the
conditions, a leaf may be converted into any
other organ, and any other organ into a leaf.
In like manner, in osteology, he assumed that
one vertebra of the spine might be considered
the unit of the skeleton : the head was only the
uppermost vertebra transformed. " The plant
goes from knot to knot, closing, at last, with the
flower and the seed. So the tape- worm, the
caterpillar, goes from knot to knot, and closes

GOETHE J OR, THE WRITER. 271

with the head. Man and the higher animals are
built up through the vertebrae, the powers being
concentrated in the head." In optics, again, he
rejected the artificial theory of seven colors, and
considered that every color was the mixture of
light and darkness in new proportions. It is
really of very little consequence what topic he
writes upon. He sees at every pore, and has
a certain gravitation towards truth. He will
realize what you say. He hates to be trifled
with, and to be made to say over again some old
wife's fable, that has had possession of men's
faith these thousand years. He may as well see
if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here,
he would say, to be the measure and judge of
these things. Why should I take them on trust ?
And, therefore, what he says of religion, of
passion, of marriage, of manners, of property, of
paper money, of periods of belief, of omens,
'of luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten.
Take the most remarkable example that could
occur of this tendency to verify every term in
popular use. The Devil had played an important
part in mythology in all times. Goethe would
have no word that does not cover a thing. The
same measure will still serve : "I have never
heard of any crime which I might not have
committed." So he flies at the throat of this

272 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

imp. He shall be real ; he shall be modern ; he
shall be European ; he shall dress like a gentle-
man, and accept the manners, and walk in the
streets, and be well initiated in the life of Vienna,
and of Heidelberg, in 1820, — or he shall not
exist. Accordingly, he stripped him of mytho-
logic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail,
brimstone, and blue-fire, and, instead of looking
in books and pictures, looked for him in his own
mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness, and
unbelief that, in crowds, or in solitude, darkens
over the human thought, — and found that the
portrait gained reality and terror by every thing
he added, and by every thing he took away. He
found that the essence of this hobgoblin, which
had hovered in shadow about the habitations of
men, ever since there were men, was pure intel-
lect, applied, — as always there is a tendency, —
to the service of the senses : and he flung into
literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic
figure that has been added for some ages, and
which will remain as long as the Prometheus.

I have no design to enter into any analysis of
his numerous works. They consist of transla-
tions, criticism, dramas, lyric and every other
description of poems, literary journals, and por-
traits of distinguished men. Yet I cannot omit
to specify the Wilhelm Meister.

273

Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the
first of its kind, called by its admirers the only
delineation of modern society, — as if other novels,
those of Scott, for example, dealt with costume
and condition, this with the spirit of life. It is
a book over which some veil is still drawn. It
is read by very intelligent persons with wonder
and delight. It is preferred by some such to
Hamlet, as a work of genius. I suppose, no book
of this century can compare with it in its delicious
sweetness, so new, so provoking to the mind,
gratifying it with so many and so solid thoughts,
just insights into life, and manners, and characters ;
so many good hints for the conduct of life, so
many unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere,
and never a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A very
provoking book to the curiosity of young men
of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers
of light reading, those who look in it for the
entertainment they find in a romance, are disap-
pointed. On the other hand, those who begin it
with the higher hope to read in it a worthy
history of genius, and the just award of the
laurel to its toils and denials, have also reason to
complain. We had an English romance here, not
long ago. professing to embody the hope of a
new age, and to unfold the political hope of the
party called l Young England,' in which the only

274 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

reward of virtue is a seat in parliament, and a peer-
age. Goethe's romance has a conclusion as lame
and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its
continuation, has sketched a truer and more
dignified picture. In the progress of the story,
the characters of the hero and heroine expand at
a rate that shivers the porcelain chess-table of
aristocratic convention : they quit the society and
habits of their rank j they lose their wealth ; they
become the servants of great ideas, and of the
most generous social ends ; until, at last, the hero,
who is the centre and fountain of an association
for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the
human race, no longer answers to his own titled
name : it sounds foreign and remote in his ear.
" I am only man," he says ; " I breathe and work
for man," and this in poverty and extreme sacrifices.
Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has so many
weaknesses and impurities, and keeps such bad
company, that the sober English public, when
the book was translated, were disgusted. And
yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with know-
ledge of the world, and with knowledge of laws ;
the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and with
such few strokes, and not a word too much, the
book remains ever so new and unexhausted, that
we must even let it go its way, and be willing to
get what good from it we can, assured that it has

275

only begun its office, and has millions of readers
yet to serve.

The argument is the passage of a democrat to
the aristocracy, using both words in their best
sense. And this passage is not made in any
mean or creeping way, but through the hall door.
Nature and character assist, and the rank is made
real by sense and probity in the nobles. No gen-
erous youth can escape this charm of reality in
the book, so that it is highly stimulating to intel-
lect and courage.

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the
book as " thoroughly modern and prosaic ; the
romantic is completely levelled in it ; so is the
poetry of nature ; the wonderful. The book
treats only of the ordinary affairs of men : it is a
poeticized civic and domestic story. The wonder-
ful in it is expressly treated as fiction and enthu-
siastic dreaming:" — and yet, what is also
characteristic, Novalis soon returned to this book,
and it remained his favorite reading to the end
of his life.

What distinguishes Goethe for French and
English readers, is a property which he shares
with his nation, — a habitual reference to interior
truth. In England and in America, there is a
respect for talent ; and, if it is exerted in support
of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party,

276 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

or in regular opposition to any, the public is satis-
fied. In France, there is even a greater delight
in intellectual brilliancy, for its own sake. And,
in all these countries, men of talent write from
talent. It is enough if the understanding is oc-
cupied, the taste propitiated, — so many columns,
so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable
way. The German intellect wants the French
sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of
the English, and the American adventure ; but it
has a certain probity, which never rests in a su-
perficial performance, but asks steadily, To what
end ? A German public asks for a controlling
sincerity. Here is activity of thought j but what
is it for ? What does the man mean ? Whence,
whence all these thoughts ?

Talent alone can not make a writer. There
must be a man behind the book ; a personality
which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the
doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see
and state things so, and not otherwise ; holding
things because they are things. If he can not
rightly express himself to-day, the same things
subsist, and will open themselves to-morrow.
There lies the burden on his mind, — the burden
of truth to be declared, — more or less understood ;
and it constitutes his business and calling in the
world, to see those facts through, and to make

GOETHE j OR, THE WRITER. 277

them known. What signifies that he trips and
stammers ; that his voice is harsh or hissing ; that
his method or his tropes are inadequate ? That
message will find method and imagery, articulation
and melody. Though he were dumb y it would
speak. If not, — if there be no such God's word in
the man, — what care we how adroit, how fluent,
how brilliant he is ?

It makes a great difference to the force of any
sentence, whether there be a man behind it, or no.
In the learned journal, in the influential newspa-
per, I discern no form ; only some irresponsible
shadow ; oftener some monied corporation, or some
dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his
paragraph, to pass for somebody. But, through
every clause and part of speech of a right book,
I meet the eyes of the most determined of men :
his force and terror inundate every word : the
commas and dashes are alive ; so that the writing
is athletic and nimble, — can go far and live long.

In England and America, one may be an adept
in the writing of a Greek or Latin poet, without
any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent
years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a pre-
sumption that he holds heroic opinions, or under-
values the fashions of his town. But the German
nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these
subjects : the student, out of the lecture-room, still
24

278 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

broods on the lessons ; and the professor can not
divest himself of the fancy, that the truths of
philosophy have some application to Berlin and
Munich. This earnestness enables them to out-
see men of much more talent. Hence, almost all
the valuable distinctions which are current in
higher conversation, have been derived to us from
Germany. But, whilst men distinguished for wit
and learning, in England and France, adopt their
study and their side with a certain levity, and
are not understood to be very deeply engaged, from
grounds of character, to the topic or the part they
espouse, — Goethe, the head and body of the Ger-
man nation, does not speak from talent, but the
truth shines through : he is very wise, though his
talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent
his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view.
It awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable
independence which converse with truth gives :
hear you, or forbear, his fact abides ,* and your
interest in the writer is not confined to his story,
and he dismissed from memory, when he has
performed his task creditably, as a baker when
he has left his loaf ; but his work is the least part
of him. The old Eternal Genius who built the
world has confided himself more to this man than
to any other. I dare not say that Goethe ascend-
ed to the highest grounds from which genius has

THE WRITER. 279

spoken. He has not worshipped the highest
unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to the
moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poe-
try than any he has sounded. There are writers
poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more
touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to
men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth :
but to truth for the sake of culture. He has no
aims less large than the conquest of universal na-
ture, of universal truth, to be his portion : a man
not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed ; of
a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having
one test for all men, — What can you teach me ?
All possessions are valued by him for that only ;
rank, privileges, health, time, being itself.

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all
arts, and sciences, and events ; artistic, but not
artist ; spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is
nothing he had not right to know : there is no
weapon in the armory of universal genius he did
not take into his hand, but with peremptory heed
that he should not be for a moment prejudiced
by his instruments. He lays a ray of light under
every fact, and between himself and his dearest
property. From him nothing was hid, nothing
withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him,
and the saint who saw the daemons ; and the
metaphysical elements took form. " Piety itself is

280 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

no aim, but only a means, whereby, through
purest inward peace, we may attain to highest
culture." And his penetration of every secret of
the fine arts will make Goethe still more statu-
esque. His affections help him, like women em-
ployed by Cicero to worm out the secret of
conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy
of him you may be, — if so you shall teach him
aught which your good-will can not, — were it
only what experience will accrue from your ruin.
Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms.
He can not hate any body ; his time is worth too
much. Temperamental antagonisms may be
suffered, but like feuds of emperors, who fight
dignifiedly across kingdoms.

His autobiography, under the title of " Poetry
and Truth out of my Life," is the expression of
the idea, — now familiar to the world through the
German mind, but a novelty to England, Old and
New, when that book appeared, — that a man exists
for culture ; not for what he can accomplish, but
for what can be accomplished in him. The
reaction of things on the man is the only note-
worthy result. An intellectual man can see him-
self as a third person ; therefore his faults and
delusions interest him equally with his successes.
Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes
more to know the history and destiny of man ;

GOETHE ; OR, THE WRITER. 281

whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him
are only interested in a low success.

This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahr-
heit, and directs the selection of the incidents ;
and nowise the external importance of events,
the rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes.
Of course, the book affords slender materials for
what would be reckoned w r ith us a " Life of
Goethe;" — few dates; no correspondence; no
details of offices or employments ; no light on
his marriage ; and, a period of ten years, that
should be the most active in his life, after his
settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Mean-
time, certain love-affairs, that came to nothing, as
people say, have the strangest importance : he
crowds us with details : — certain whimsical opin-
ions, cosmogonies, and religions of his own in-
vention, and, especially his relations to remarkable
minds, and to critical epochs of thought : — these he
magnifies. His " Daily and Yearly Journal," his
" Italian Travels," his " Campaign in France,"
and the historical part of his " Theory of Colors,"
have the same interest. In the last, he rapidly
notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton,
Voltaire, &c. ; and the charm of this portion of
the book consists in the simplest statement of the
relation betwixt these grandees of European
scientific history and himself; the mere drawing
24*

282 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

of the lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe
to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton. The draw-
ing of the line is for the time and person, a solu-
tion of the formidable problem, and gives pleasure
when Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any-
cost of invention comparable to that of Iphige-
nia and Faust.

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it
that he knew too much, that his sight was micro-
scopic, and interfered with the just perspective,
the seeing of the whole ? He is fragmentary ;
a writer of occasional poems, and of an encyclo-
paedia of sentences. When he sits down to
write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his
observations from a hundred sides, and combines
them into the body as fitly as he can. A great
deal refuses to incorporate : this he adds loosely,
as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals,
or the like. A great deal still is left that will not
find any place. This the bookbinder alone can
give any cohesion to : and hence, notwithstand-
ing the looseness of many of his works, we
have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms,
xenien, &c.

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew
out of the calculations of self-culture. It was
the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved
the world out of gratitude ; who knew where

GOETHE J OR, THE WRITER. 283

libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, sa-
vans, and leisure, were to be had, and who did
not quite trust the compensations of poverty and
nakedness. Socrates loved Athens ; Montaigne,
Paris ; and Madame de Stael said, she was only
vulnerable on that side; (namely, of Paris.) It
has its favorable aspect. All the geniuses are
usually so ill-assorted and sickly, that one is evei
wishing them somewhere else. We seldom see
any body who is not uneasy or afraid to live.
There is a slight blush of shame on the cheek
of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of
caricature. But this man was entirely at home
and happy in his century and the world. None
was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed the
game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius
of his works, is their power. The idea of abso-
lute, eternal truth, without reference to my own
enlargement by it, is higher. The surrender to
the torrent of poetic inspiration is higher ; but,
compared with any motives on which books are
written in England and America, this is very
truth, and has the power to inspire which belongs
to truth. Thus has he brought back to a book
some of its ancient might and dignity.

Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and
country, when original talent was oppressed under
the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries, and

£84 REPRESENTATIVE MEN.

the distracting variety of claims, taught men how-
to dispose of this mountainous miscellany, and
make it subservient. I join Napoleon with him,
as being both representatives of the impatience
and reaction of nature against the morgue of
conventions, — two stern realists, who, with their
scholars, have severally set the axe at the root
of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time,
and for all time. This cheerful laborer, with no
external popularity or provocation, drawing his
motive and his plan from his own breast, tasked
himself with stints for a giant, and, without
relaxation or rest, except by alternating his pur-
suits, worked on for eighty years with the steadi-
ness of his first zeal.

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the
highest simplicity of structure is produced, not
by few elements, but by the highest complexity.
Man is the most composite of all creatures : the
wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other ex-
treme. We shall learn to draw rents and reve-
nues from the immense patrimony of the old and
the recent ages. Goethe teaches courage, and the
equivalence of all times ; that the disadvantages
of any epoch exist only to the faint-hearted,
Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close
by the darkest and deafest eras, No mortgage,
no attainder, w T ill hold on men or hours, The

GOETHE , OR, THE WRITER. 285

world is young : the former great men call to us
affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite
again the heavens and the earthly world. The
secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for
us ; to realize all that we know ; in the high
refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in
books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and
a purpose ; and first, last, midst, and without end,
to honor every truth by use.

THE END.

Date Due

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